New Thoughts on the Extinction of Neanderthals

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA—The Washington Post reports that evolutionary biologist Oren Kolodny of Stanford University and his colleague Marc Feldman built a computer model to test how hominin population sizes and migration patterns could have affected the survival of Neanderthals in Europe. “It’s the simplest model that we can build without assuming any hard-to-prove claims, like selection or environmental change,” Kolodny said. The researchers ran the simulation hundreds of thousands of times, and in each one, a species had to go extinct, since two species cannot occupy the same environmental niche at the same time. In most of the simulations, Neanderthals died out within 12,000 years of the arrival of modern humans in Europe. Kolodny thinks that humans' gradual migration could have been enough to wipe out the Neanderthals. For more, go to “Should We Clone Neanderthals?”