The Humans Who Went Instinct: Why Neanderthals died out and we survived

Clive Finlayson “The Humans Who Went Instinct: Why Neanderthals died out and we survived”   Oxford Univ. Press, 2009, 220 pp. (Plus addl. 30 pgs. of notes)

Most people today think of Neanderthals as a big, clumsy, not very bright, version of humans.  This ill-informed view comes from people who dedicate large portions of their lives in front of a T.V. watching Fred & Barney Flintstone, reality and gossip shows and “news” with political spin.  Finlayson supports a different view: Neanderthals were big, though not as mobile as our more recent “Ancestors,”  But they may have been every bit as smart as our ancestors, their brains were actually bigger and it appears they could talk and their culture was not so very different from our own ancestors.  At some point in our distant past we shared an ancestor with them.  Recent studies of Neanderthal fossil DNA have led to an estimate that we shared an ancestor about 600 to 400 thousand years ago (pg. 106). 

Neanderthals had at least 200,000 years of successful living in the various climates of northwestern Eurasia.  Fifty thousand years ago Eurasia was occupied only by Neanderthals; but by thirty thousand years ago they disappeared and were replaced by modern humans.  It was their big bodies that did them in when the Ice Age occurred; it was a matter of luck that we survived while they perished.  They had very little, if any, contact with our ancestors, and there is no evidence that they inter-bred with each other.  The Neanderthals were not the cold-adapted humans of Ice Age Europe as they have often been portrayed; instead they grew up in the woodlands and savannahs, often around wetlands, of the mid-latitude belt of Eurasia. (pg. 115).

Western children’s pathetic education deprives them from a true understanding of where modern humans came from, and, consequently, from truly knowing what we are and the dramatic effect past climate changes have had on the direction and survival of the human race.  We have the largest percentage of people that believe humans essentially descended from the clouds.  It is not understood that the proper time-frame for understanding humanity began about 10 million years in the past when there were proto-humans, not just Neanderthals. 

My Notes:

Pg. viii:

The Neanderthals were humans who separated from our lineage around half-a-million years ago.  The separation is represented by two distinct lineages that appear to have been geographically isolated—H. neanderthalensis in Eurasia and H. sapiens in Africa—for a considerable time.  (Some authors treat Neanderthals as a human sub-species but, so far, there is no evidence of inter-breeding.)

 Since the separation of the two lineages, our people and the Neanderthals developed differences that probably had to do with their lifestyles.  The Neanderthals became a tough, well-built, people.  They had large brains, even bigger than ours, and they lived across Europe and northern Asia as far as eastern Siberia and perhaps even into Mongolia and China.  They could probably speak and they were highly adaptable; in some places they ambushed deer and even larger animals while in others they beachcombed or gathered pine nuts.  Rarely would they have taken on the largest animals—the image of the Neanderthal taking on a woolly mammoth is probably false. 

Pg. 3:  A cataclysmic event shook the Earth 65 million years ago with far-reaching and irreversible consequences.  A massive asteroid impact together with major volcanic activity and sea level changes caused the extinction of all land animals larger than a small dog (the K/T event). It included the dinosaurs and it opened a window of opportunity for other animals.  Our early ancestors were among those that seized the moment.  We came from a tiny, shrew-like mammal that spent its life scurrying in the undergrowth of remote ancient forests.

Pg. 22:  Around 500,000 years ago a clan of people lived in some of the valleys of northern Spain.  To all intents and purposes they were recognizably human.  They were intelligent, tall, and well built: they averaged 5’7’’ in height, weighed around 207 lbs, had brains of comparable size to ours, lived in social groups, and were probably able to speak.  More than 5,000 human fossils belonging to at least 28 individuals have now been recovered in “the Pit of the Bones”.

Pg. 49:  A great deal of fuss has been made about the earliest emergence of humans from Africa; but the evidence in support of a first geographical expansion from Africa into Asia by H. erectus, in his African version, is not well backed up by the available evidence.  The story has usually gone something like this: Homo erectus was the first human species that had long legs and a big brain, could make tools, and actively hunted in grassy savannahs for meat.  This suite of features allowed it to migrate out of Africa and colonize Asia.  Here we have another example of conventional wisdom that resists debunking even though the evidence in its favor is virtually nonexistent.  The conventional story reveals a deeply ingrained misunderstanding of the way in which species expand their geographical ranges, i.e., the youngsters move to vacant territory usually adjacent to the parents, and so on.

Pg. 105:  Human history has been an affair between contingency and luck, conspiring with the erratic whims of climate and geology to produce the improbable character that is Homo sapiens.

Pg. 144:  It was in the caves of the Rock of Gibraltar that the last Neanderthals survived for at least 2 thousand years later than anywhere else.  (I’ve been there but was unaware at the time that the visit had anything to do with geneology).

Pg. 175:  The Neanderthal extinction was the extinction of a particular body form that had been around for 250,000 thousand years.  It was a body form not exclusive to the Neanderthal but to many other humans too.  That one population of Ancestors was able to change its physique in one part of the world where it was continuously exposed to open environments was the result of circumstances.  That the environment to which this body form was suited should have subsequently expanded so greatly was again a matter of pure chance.  The jump onto the steppe-tundra was indeed a small step for a population of Ancestors, but its impact was to be greater than Man’s first landing on the Moon thirty millennia later.  Humans became endurance runners that hunted in packs (much like the wolves which they subsequently domesticated).

Pg. 218:  We owe our existence to chance.  From asteroid impacts to volcanic eruptions to simply being in the right place at the right time, we are here because of luck.  It is easy to fall into the circular reasoning that we are here and therefore we are the product of successful genes.  We should not delude ourselves.  Our genes are successful, like those of all other species that exist today, only to the extent that they have made it to this point.  There were many highly successful lineages that went extinct because their luck ran out—the Neanderthals and other populations of proto-Ancestors among them.

Pg. 219:  When we pause to consider what a tiny fraction of our evolutionary history has been taken up by our post-farming existence, it becomes blindingly obvious that our biological make-up was formed almost entirely before farming.  Farming has only been present for the last 10,000 years.

Pg. 220:  Who of us will survive the next great climate change, asteroid impact, and volcanic eruptions,… whatever?  There is enough in the story of this book to suggest that it will not be those of us in the comfort zone, the auto-domesticated slaves of electricity, motor cars, and cyberspace, who would not last more than a few days without supporting technology (that be me).  The tradition that produced the bureaucrat, the priest, and the king generated communities of specialists, which was fine as long as conditions were favorable.  But when things get bad these societies of experts will become strained to their limits.  Those today living on the margins will, as they have in the past, be the most able to adapt.