Of the many possible explanations for the demise of the Neandertals
(competition with humans, sex with humans and being folded into our
genome, infection from humans, climate), researchers say in this week’s Nature that
climate can now be ruled out. A massive project at The University of Leeds examined three possible extinction dates for our sister species. They compared the dates with a deep-sea core drilled from the Cariaco Basin in Venezuela and found that in two cases there was no change in the weather, and in the last case, an encroaching cold change was 1000 years in the making–not the kind of cataclysmic event that would extinguish a species overnight.
