How To Avoid Meeting The Neanderthals' Fate
A reconstruction of Homo neanderthalensis at Neanderthal Museum, Mettmann, Germany Wikimedia Commons It's a fact of the archaeological record: Modern humans survived and Neanderthals did not. Why? And what does it teach us about our own survival? Neanderthals were humans who went extinct between 20,000 and 30,000 years ago. Though there is some debate about who these people were, there is no question that there are none left. All that remains of the hundreds of Neanderthal groups that roved across Europe and Central Asia are a handful of ambiguous funeral sites, bones, tools, and pieces of art-along with some DNA that modern humans inherited from them. How can we avoid meeting the Neanderthals' fate? That depends on what you think wiped out these early humans in the millennia after they met H. sapiens. By 40,000 years ago, humans had spread in waves across most of the world, from Africa to Europe,...