Posted: Apr 15, 2020 3:39 pm
scott1328 wrote:zoon wrote:Spearthrower wrote:aufbahrung wrote:They were killed off by disease, at least in my thinking. My theory for a long time is that they were smarter and better adapted but met with a disease. Some sort of bat-flu from living in caves and mixing with bats?
So all neanderthals, spread across thousands of miles, isolated from one and other, all independently got a disease from bats and died out coincidentally with the arrival of early modern humans?..
This does suggest early modern humans had some significant advantage over neanderthals, is there any consensus on what it might have been?
Jared Diamond of "Guns, Germs, and Steel", would hypothesize that the germs carried by early modern man out of Africa is what did in the Neanderthals.
Diamond's idea is based upon pastoralism/animal husbandry - humans living cheek by jowl with their domesticated animals, but this period is tens of thousands of years prior to such domestication.
It also requires that either EMH encountered essentially all neanderthal populations, or that neanderthal populations were in routine enough contact with one and other to spread that disease contracted from EMH. One must also wonder why neanderthals didn't pass on their diseases and have similar level extinction impacts on EMH populations. I expect neanderthal populations by this point were small enough that the impact would've been much greater on them, but it's hard to explain their total disappearance by disease alone.