A short history of nearly everything - Bill Bryson [230]
For a long time, it was believed that the Cro-Magnons, as modern humans in Europe became known, drove the Neandertals before them as they advanced across the continent, eventually forcing them to its western margins, where essentially they had no choice but to fall in the sea or go extinct. In fact, it is now known that Cro-Magnons were in the far west of Europe at about the same time they were also coming in from the east. “Europe was a pretty empty place in those days,” Tattersall says. “They may not have encountered each other all that often, even with all their comings and goings.” One curiosity of the Cro-Magnons' arrival is that it came at a time known to paleoclimatology as the Boutellier interval, when Europe was plunging from a period of relative mildness into yet another long spell of punishing cold. Whatever it was that drew them to Europe, it wasn't the glorious weather.
In any case, the idea that Neandertals crumpled in the face of competition from newly arrived Cro-Magnons strains against the evidence at least a little. Neandertals were nothing if not tough. For tens of thousands of years they lived through conditions that no modern human outside a few polar scientists and explorers has experienced. During the worst of the ice ages, blizzards with hurricane-force winds were common. Temperatures routinely fell to 50 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Polar bears padded across the snowy vales of southern England. Neandertals naturally retreated from the worst of it, but even so they will have experienced weather that was at least as bad as a modern Siberian winter. They suffered, to be sure—a Neandertal who lived much past thirty was lucky indeed—but as a species they were magnificently resilient and practically indestructible. They survived for at least a hundred thousand years, and perhaps twice that, over an area stretching from Gibraltar to Uzbekistan, which is a pretty successful run for any species of being.
Quite who they were and what they were like remain matters of disagreement and uncertainty. Right up until the middle of the twentieth century the accepted anthropological view of the Neandertal was that he was dim, stooped, shuffling, and simian—the quintessential caveman. It was only a painful accident that prodded scientists to reconsider this view. In 1947, while doing fieldwork in the Sahara, a Franco-Algerian paleontologist named Camille Arambourg took refuge from the midday sun under the wing of his light airplane. As he sat there, a tire burst from the heat, and the plane tipped suddenly, striking him a painful blow on the upper body. Later in Paris he went for an X-ray of his neck, and noticed that his own vertebrae were aligned exactly like those of the stooped and hulking Neandertal. Either he was physiologically primitive or Neandertal's posture had been misdescribed. In fact, it was the latter. Neandertal vertebrae were not simian at all. It changed utterly how we viewed Neandertals—but only some of the time, it appears.
It is still commonly held that Neandertals lacked the intelligence or fiber to compete on equal terms with the continent's slender and more cerebrally nimble newcomers, Homo sapiens. Here is a typical comment from a recent book: “Modern humans neutralized this advantage [the Neandertal's considerably heartier physique] with better clothing, better fires and better shelter; meanwhile the Neandertals were stuck with an oversize body that required more food to sustain.” In other words, the very factors that had allowed them to survive successfully for a hundred thousand years suddenly became an insuperable handicap.
Above all the issue that is almost never addressed is that Neandertals had brains that were significantly larger than those of modern people—1.8 liters for Neandertals versus 1.4 for modern people, according to one calculation. This is more than the difference between modern Homo sapiens and late Homo erectus, a species we are happy to regard as barely human. The