'Absolved' climate for the disappearance of the Neanderthals from the Mediterranean

The disappearance of the Neanderthals from the western Mediterranean region is not attributable to the climatic changes of the last ice age, but probably to the most advanced hunting technologies of Homo sapiens. This is demonstrated by the new paleoclimatic reconstructions that emerged from the analysis of stalagmites of the caves of the Murge plateau, in Puglia, one of the few areas in the world where Neanderthal and sapiens coexisted side by side, from about 45,000 to 42,000 years ago. The results of the study are published in Nature Ecology & Evolution by an international group led by the University of Bologna.

"Stalagmites are excellent paleoclimatic and paleoenvironmental archives," explains study coordinator Jo De Waele. "Their formation requires the infiltration of rainwater from the outside and this therefore makes them an indisputable evidence of the presence or absence of rain; moreover, the carbon and oxygen isotopes of the calcite of which they are composed give indications on the state soil and the amount of rain during their entire formation period. "

The Apulian stalagmites at the center of the study show a continuous deposition throughout the last glacial cycle, and also in the previous ones: this means that there has been no drastic climatic variation. "The analyzes show slight excursions of rainfall between about 50,000 and 27,000 years ago, but not such as to generate a variation of the vegetation present on the soils above the cave", explains Jo De Waele.

The data emerging from the study seem to indicate that the great changes in the climate that occurred during the last ice age have been absorbed in a different way in the Mediterranean area compared to what happened in continental Europe and in the high latitudes of Greenland. And this would lead to excluding the climatic hypothesis as the cause of the extinction of the Neanderthals.

"The results of this research make the hypothesis put forward by several researchers even more plausible according to which there is a technological motivation behind the extinction of the Neanderthals", explains Stefano Benazzi, paleoanthropologist of the University of Bologna, among the authors of the study . "According to this theory, hunting technology in particular, much more advanced for Homo sapiens than the Neanderthal, would have contributed primarily to the supremacy of the former over the latter, leading to the disappearance of the Neanderthals after about 3,000 years of coexistence between the two species. "