BBC: How Did the Last Neanderthals Live

The BBC has a post on some archaeological discoveries that have illuminated how the Neandertals lived.  Melissa Hogenboom writes:

For the most part, Neanderthals were a resilient group. They existed for about 200,000 years longer than we modern humans (Homo sapiens) have been alive. Evidence of their existence vanishes around 28,000 years ago – giving us an estimate for when they may, finally, have died off.

Fossil evidence shows that, towards the end, the final few were clinging onto survival in places like Gibraltar. Findings from this British overseas territory, located at the southern tip of the Iberian peninsula, are helping us to understand more about what these last living Neanderthals were really like. And new insights reveal that they were much more like us than we once believed.

It always seems to strike these writers as odd that Neandertals were capable of culture roughly equivalent to our own.  The last group of Neandertals lived at a time that was much harsher, climate-wise, than today, with the tundra line being equivalent in latitude, to Vienna.

The original Gibraltar skull was discovered in 1848 (eight years before the type specimen was discovered in the Neander Valley, in Germany).  Clive Finlayson, the Director of the Gibraltar Museum has been part of a team that has been excavating the set of caves there and four caves have been identified.

“It was in some way Neanderthal city,” he says. “This was the place with the highest concentration of Neanderthals anywhere in Europe.” It’s not known if this might amount to only dozens of people, or a few families, since genetic evidence also suggests that Neanderthals lived in “many small subpopulations.”

There is still considerable mystery surrounding just why the Neandertals faded out. The best theory going at the moment is gene swamping. Given that the Neandertal and early modern human genomes were both probably pretty stable, Neandertal/modern human mating could very well have resulted in hybrid depression. Eventually, the Neandertal genes, facing negative selection, dropped out of the genome.