Nature, 12 September 2007

Study suggests demise did not coincide with climate cooling.

Michael Hopkin

Whatever it was that sealed the fate of the Neanderthals, it looks unlikely to
have been climate change. That is the verdict of a new study that used climate
records from Venezuela to deduce what happened at the Neanderthals' last stand
at the southern tip of Europe.

The research suggests that a switch to a cold, dry climate was probably not the
telling factor in the demise of the Neanderthals, because of all the probable
dates for their extinction, most do not lie near major cold events in the
climate record.

Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) lived in Europe until around 30,000 years
ago - not long after Homo sapiens arrived on the scene 40,000 years ago. The
Neanderthals are thought to have lasted longest in the region around Gibraltar,
off the southern tip of Spain.

"There are different factors that have been invoked to explain the Neanderthal
extinction," says Chronis Tzedakis of the University of Leeds, UK, who led the
new research. "Clearly the appearance of anatomically modern humans is the prime
suspect, but given that the extinction happened during the last glacial period,
when climate was changing, what we know is that the climate was extremely
unstable at that time."

Full article here:

http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070910/full/070910-7.html