Climate change saw off the last of the Neanderthals from their final stronghold on the Iberian peninsula thousands of years ago, according to new research. The discovery is in stark contrast to earlier research that suggested humans drove our evolutionary cousins to extinction during the last Ice Age.
Researchers at the University of Granada, Spain, and their collaborators, have reconstructed the Neanderthal climate on the basis of marine records and found that the weather across the whole of present-day Spain and Portugal was atrocious. Something modern Iberians and the million hordes who venture on to the Peninsula for blue skies and sunshine would certainly not recognise. The findings lift the blame squarely from the shoulders of Homo sapiens. Unless, of course, our ancestors were influencing the climate as much as we believe we are today.
Martinez-Ruiz Group (Martinez-Ruiz second from right)
Francisco José Jiménez Espejo and colleagues Francisca Martínez Ruiz and Miguel Ortega Huertas in UGR’s department of Mineralogy and Petrology and the Andalusian Regional Institute of Earth Sciences worked with scientists Clive Finlayson from the Gibraltar Museum and Adina Paytan from the Gibraltar Museum, Stanford University and the Japan Marine Science & Technology Centre to acquit the human race of all blame in the demise of Homo neanderthalensis
The key evidence that absolves humans is the large drop in Neanderthal populations on the Iberian peninsula that coincide with severe fluctuations in climate that occurred before the first H. sapiens had even crossed the Pyrenees or set foot on Iberia. The cold, arid and highly variable climate revealed by the marine records was very unfavourable for the apparently less adaptable Neanderthals. Indeed, 24,000 years ago they faced the worst weather seen on the Peninsula in the last quarter of a million years.
Neanderthal’s preferred pleasant weather (Image adapted from American Mus. Nat. Hist.)
Having been exonerated with respect to one species, the research does not excuse our current preoccupation with destroying habitats and polluting the planet.
Further reading
Quatern. Sci. Rev., 2007, in press
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2006.12.013
Mineroligia y Geodynamica De Loas Ambientes Sedimentario y Metamorphico
http://www.ugr.es/~grupo179/
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