Round 41,000 years in the past, the final Neanderthal took their remaining breath. At that second, we turned the one remaining hominins, the only survivors of the as soon as numerous household of bipedal apes.
We’ll by no means know precisely when or the place this momentous occasion occurred, however we do know the Neanderthals died out suspiciously near the time when fashionable people arrived of their territory. Precisely why they vanished has lengthy been hotly debated, however astonishing revelations from the genomes of the final Neanderthals and hidden in a exceptional collapse France are actually portray an in depth image of those first encounters – and what might need occurred subsequent.
“This is a major turning point in our understanding of Neanderthals and their extinction process,” says Ludovic Slimak on the Centre for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse, France.
Our species, Homo sapiens, and Neanderthals share a standard ancestor, however Neanderthals break up from our lineage a minimum of 400,000 years in the past, evolving in Eurasia, from the Mediterranean to Siberia. Our species is youthful, first showing in Africa some 300,000 years in the past and evolving into hominins that had been anatomically very like us by a minimum of 195,000 years in the past. Fashionable people left the continent in waves from round 170,000 years in the past, and had been thought to have reached western Europe roughly 43,000 years in the past, when – in accordance with the…
