Was the Culprit Climate or Culture?

摘要

The Neanderthals are at once the best known and the most controversial of all fossil humans. They inhabited Europe just before modern people, and this observation, established in the late 1800s, prompted a long debate: did the Neanderthals evolve into modern people or were they extinguished when modern people arrived from elsewhere? For nearly a century, the issue seemed irresolvable, but fossil and genetic discoveries over the past two decades have pointed ever more strongly to extinction. The fossils, associated with firm dates, show that the Neanderthal and modern human lineages split more than 350,000 years ago. The Neanderthals evolved in Europe, but by 80,000 years ago, they had expanded to western Asia. Modern humans evolved in Africa. Beginning about 50,000 years ago they burst out to swamp or extinguish the Neanderthals, first in western Asia and later in Europe. Molecular genetic analyses since 1987 have repeatedly painted the same picture: modern humans originated recently in Africa and subsequently spread to replace the Neanderthals with little or no interbreeding.