Neanderthal went extinct due to human cultural superiority
Staff writer ▼ | February 8, 2016
A trio of researchers from Stanford University in the U.S. and Meiji University in Japan has created a model that showed that it might be possible that the Neanderthal extinction was due to the cultural superiority of humans.Article continues below
William Gilpin, Marcus Feldman and Kenichi Aoki describe the factors they used to create their model and why they believe it was possible that cultural differences might have been enough to drive the Neanderthal to extinction.
Prior research has shown that populations of Neanderthal were living unfettered in Europe for hundreds of thousands of years, but then, approximately 45 thousand years ago, modern humans arrived in the area after migrating out of Africa—five thousand years later, the Neanderthal were gone.
The researchers used a computer model that had already been built by others to mimic interspecies competition—they added elements that allowed for taking into consideration cultural and technical abilities.
The result, they claim, is evidence that a culture that was more culturally advanced could displace one that was less so—even if the less culturally advanced group was initially much larger.
The model also showed that such cultural advantages could lead to a feed-back loop—the more advanced one group became the more dominant they became, and the more dominant they became the more their cultural advantage grew.
The researchers suggest that cultural advancement goes hand-in-hand with technological innovation which would have allowed early humans to outcompete Neanderthal for natural resources. ■ What to read next
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