Researchers Think They Figured Out Why Neanderthals Went Extinct, and It’s the Wildest Theory Yet
· Vice
According to new research published in Quaternary Science Reviews, we might finally have a clearer idea of what killed neanderthals off. Apparently, they lacked the social skills to survive, proving once again that you really should get out of your house and go meet people.
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We’ve been learning so much about Neanderthals of late: from what Neanderthal kids did when they were bored, to how intelligent they actually were, to how they were all banging human women for hundreds of thousands of years. Now we know they were the ultimate loners.
There is no definitive answer to why Neanderthals became extinct. There are plenty of theories, of course. Climate change, disease, and getting absorbed into Homo sapiens populations. All good theories are probably true to some degree. Now we can add a new one to the list: they were so painfully lonely that they died from it.
Researchers at the University of Montreal used computer models, built from archaeological and ethnographic data, to map how ancient human populations spread and interacted across Europe between 60,000 and 35,000 years ago. They think they found plenty of evidence to suggest that Neanderthals were terrible at networking, while Homo sapiens were constantly staying in touch with one another.
In our modern age of isolation, we are currently proving to one another that disconnection breeds loneliness, which leads to nothing good. Homo sapiens groups may have been spread out far and wide, but they were still connected, forming loose networks that allowed them to share resources, information, and, when things got rough, couches to crash on, or whatever the ancient version of a sofa bed was at the time.
Neanderthals, on the other hand, were living in smaller, more isolated groups, essentially a bunch of loners that, as the climate changed or competition edged its way into their lands, did not provide them adequate safety nets to prop up their relatively small, meager networks. They didn’t have any neighbors to trade with and no extended circle of friends and family to get their backs when times were tough. They went at it all alone; rugged individualism at its peak…and it killed them.
Researchers Have a Wild New Theory About Why Neanderthals Went Extinct
The researchers even mapped it out to show that eastern Neanderthal populations, which were more isolated than the others, started to disappear first. Western groups, such as those in the Iberian Peninsula, held out a bit longer, probably because they were slightly more connected than their Eastern brethren. Obviously, they were connected enough to keep pace with Homo sapiens, but enough to delay the inevitable.
Our Homo sapiens ancestors, on the other hand, were living it up and thriving through our forged alliances, our shared networks of knowledge, and a communal, constant thrust of progress as we marched toward a shared future. As the article I linked above states, Homo sapiens didn’t have an edge because we were smarter than Neanderthals; we really weren’t. It’s the bonds we forged with one another and the surrounding communities that got us to this point today, and turned us into a thriving, sprawling global civilization.
The point is, don’t listen to anyone trying to divide us and turn us into a world of individuals out for themselves. Learn from the Neanderthals and know, for a fact, that isolation is a fast-track to mutual annihilation.
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