PEOPLING

The Last Neanderthals

~40,000 years ago

Palaeolithic · Upper Palaeolithic · Last glacial

Neanderthals had lived in Eurasia for more than three hundred thousand years when they left the archaeological record, around 40,000 years ago, region by region rather than all at once, and only after an overlap with incoming Homo sapiens of some 2,600 to 5,400 years. No single catastrophe is in evidence: small populations, a demanding climate and dilution into larger groups of newcomers may each have weighed.

Why it matters

A whole way of being human ended, and the manner of it matters. Millennia of coexistence leave room for exchange: of genes certainly, of techniques and ornaments perhaps. Part of the Neanderthal genome walked on in the newcomers, and is in most people today. Their end is also a mirror held up to our species: the survivor's story is written by demography as much as by any superiority.

Dating & uncertainty

Bayesian modelling of forty re-dated sites puts the end of the Mousterian, the Neanderthal toolkit, at 41,030 to 39,260 calibrated years before present across Europe, the disappearance itself falling at different times from one region to the next. Claims of much later survivals, notably in Iberia and Belgium, have dissolved under re-dating with cleaner chemistry: contaminated collagen had made some Belgian bones look up to ten thousand years younger than they are.

Sources

1. Higham et al. (2014), Nature · The timing and spatiotemporal patterning of Neanderthal disappearancedoi:10.1038/nature13621
2. Devièse et al. (2021), PNAS · Reevaluating the timing of Neanderthal disappearance in Northwest Europedoi:10.1073/pnas.2022466118
3. Djakovic, Key & Soressi (2022), Scientific Reports · Optimal linear estimation models predict 1400-2900 years of overlap between Homo sapiens and Neandertals prior to their disappearance from France and northern Spaindoi:10.1038/s41598-022-19162-z

Our species’ history as one day

20:57:083 h 3 min before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day