Climate Change May Have Helped Wipe Out Neanderthals

Climate Change May Have Helped Wipe Out Neanderthals
Monday, May 07, 2007

By Dave Mosher

E-MAIL STORY PRINTER FRIENDLY VERSION
AP

A Neanderthal skeleton, foreground, and a modern human one at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Neanderthals disappeared from Earth more than 20,000 years ago, but figuring out exactly why has continued to challenge anthropologists.

One team of scientists, however, now says they have evidence to back climate change as the main culprit.

The Iberian peninsula, better known as present-day Spain and Portugal, was one of the last Neanderthal refuges.

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Many scientists have thought that out-hunting by Homo sapiens and interbreeding with them brought Neanderthals to their demise, but climate change has also been proposed.

Francisco Jiménez-Espejo, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Granada in Spain, says a lack of evidence has left climate change weakly supported — until now.

We put data behind the theory, he said, filling in a large gap in European climate records when Neanderthals faded out of existence.

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