The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived

Were the Neanderthals less intelligent than we are? Finlayson would argue no, although he seems a bit less certain in his final chapter, in which he acknowledges that our brains may be more efficient and better organized (p.211). In any event, Finlayson is convincing in arguing that we do not need to resort to some kind of inferiority to explain the Neanderthal demise. Many human populations went extinct as a victim of climate volatility combined with relatively small numbers. Finlayson speculates that the Neanderthals were less adapted to the steppe-tundra which took over Eurasia, because while brawnier, they were not as swift or energy efficient. I prefer arguments that suggest they were not as capable at operating in larger groups, necessary to trade information, and cooperate in hunts of fleeter animals. After all, the wolves were the most successful predator by far, and they hunted in packs. Finlayson is convincing in arguing that there is no evidence that our ancestors ever displaced Neanderthals living at the same time in the same general location; also the Neanderthals survived longest in southern Spain, in a more accommodating environment, and lived a comparable life style, absent art, than our ancestors did in the same location, thousands of years later.

Art is tricky. There is evidence of figurative art produced by proto-humans 160,000 years ago (p.170), but I would argue that just as animals use rudimentary tools, this does not preclude an advance in human abilities leading to the amazing cave paintings. Finlayson is on firmer ground in asking us not to think of human migrations out of Africa, but of habitat expansion and colonization of this expanded habitat, comparable to what animal species frequently experience. Moreover, Asia and Africa really constitute one supercontinent, with a relatively easy connection in the Middle East. Finlayson emphasizes that the innovating population groups were likely those living on the margins of different habitats, especially when life for them was less comfortable. This makes intuitive sense, and reminds me of the old argument that intellectual leaps in modern times were more often made by people caught between cultural groups, and therefore marginal to both.

This book would have been a whole lot easier to follow if there were more tables and maps, some even in color, and perhaps a bit more reworking of the material.

Some random nuggets. It turns out that there were all kinds of mammals before dinosaur extinction, including medium sized predators. Current belief is that ape ancestors used bipedal walking, like orangutans today, although mostly in the trees. Stone tools date back 1.8 million years. Just by accidentally drifting on natural rafts, macaques reached remote islands, never connected to mainland.

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The recent finding that there was mating between Homo sapients and Neanderthals, as proven by the retention of some Neanderthal DNA in humans of European and Asian descent, stimulated quite a number of books on the Neanderthals, all of them necessarily quite speculative as there are few remains from which their ways of existance can be deduced. And the Neanderthal genome project, however impressive, surely cannot tell us how they thought. But what I really find disturbing are hints that humanity has much to learn from the deminse of the Neanderthals.

Finlayson's book was written before traces of Neanderthal DNA were discovered in humans, which the author just had time to mention in the Preface. But this does not impair the quality of the book as a whole. It is well written and in some respects critical of then widely accepted views, such as on the "brutishness" of the Neanderthals, which is all for the better. But I find it hard to escape the impression that this book, as many others, is overinfluenced by contemporary concerns with climate change, however justified by themselves. His basic proposition that climate changes with which the Neanderthals could not cope resulted in their demise (and not conflicts with Homo Sapiens, as was widely thought) cannot be proven and requres, therefore, more reservations than offered by the author.

This applies all the more so to hints relating to the future of homo sapiens. The author, as many others, does not adequately recognize the radical break in the evolutionary continuity of our species caused by the advanced in science and technology, including on "human enhancement," with all their in part inconceivable potentials for better and worse (as discussed in my recent book).

Thus, Finlayson states "domestication is not a complete break with the past but rather a continuum of increasing human intervention from predation to genetic engineering" (page 203). This is incorrect. Synthetic biology constituting a radical break with the past, similarly to nuclear bombs not beilng a continuation of arrows and bows.

The author well states that "Most designs, perhaps all, given enough time, no matter how perfectly matched to the present they might be, will one day be confronted with the spectre of extinction" (pp. 209-210). But the dangers facing the existance of humanity are in the main the paradoxical products of its own ingenuity, with science and technology providing self-destruct capacities control of which requires radical innovations in human values, feeling and institutions - which may or may not be within our potentials. Tthis is an unprecedented challenge. I do not think there is much that can be learned on it from the history of the Neanderthals.

Professor Yehezkel Dror
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

This book present a lot of information about all theories regarding the Neanderthals. An extremely interesting read. However, the many high school-level grammatical, punctuation, and structural errors were a consistent distraction for me. Too bad this book didn't get a more efficient editor's eye.

There are quite a number of books trying to fathom the mystery of why Neanderthals died out some 30,000 years ago, and why only we—homo sapiens—survived. One such book--The Invaders: How Humans and Their Dogs Drove Neanderthals to Extinction –makes the fascinating claim that because homo sapiens domesticated wolves, this hugely aided them in hunting down game, leaving none for the Neanderthals.
The Humans Who Went Extinct offers a far more comprehensive overview of the life and times of the two competing races. Author Clive Finlayson examines many aspect of human development and weaves a complex narrative of the many forces that caused us to survive and a number of other human-like species to die out. He recounts the enormous climate changes the Earth experienced and the effect on land cover—changes in dense forest to open savannas. Neanderthals were brutishly built, best for close-in or “ambush hunting.” As tree were replaced by grassland, Neanderthals could not run down game in “pursuit hunting” as the more slender homo sapiens managed.
Findlay also lays to rest the enduring claims of mass human migration from one locale to another. No migration occurred other than the normal expansion of any human population which required a great deal of territory in order to obtain essential game.
But Findlay pulls punches when he gets to the modern time scale, as do all anthropologists to whom this one important element is anathema—continuing Darwinian diversity.
He brings up the candelabra splitting up of early hominids into various groupings. Thus, from Homo erectus sprang Neanderthals, Aborigines, Plains People and Aurignacians. But his candelabra stops there. It seems to be an iron law of anthropology that one shall not discuss the continuing splitting up of humans into ever finer distinct groups. Pygmies, Tsut-Tsies, Negros, Caucasians, etc. This continuing evolution smacks too much of “racism,” and thus may not be discussed. Even more disheartening is the refusal to consider that Home Erectus slowly superseded Home Neanderthalsis because the latter were of higher intelligence. But Findlay utters not a word about possible intelligence differences between these various human-like groups because that would beg the question of human races—a subject anathema to nearly all anthropologists.
Thus my rating of four stars for an excellent, erudite and comprehensive description of early man and his down-selection into us—homo sapiens. The fifth star is withheld because the human tale has not ended yet—and the anthropologist know it—and won’t bring the subject up.

Clive Finlayson is an evolutionary ecologist and a champion skeptic. He routinely rejects theories based on no evidence, even if they are solidly supported by popular whims, like the widely held belief in the inferiority of Neanderthals. What science now knows about human evolution is something like finding 100 pieces of a 10,000-piece puzzle.

Experts have a strong urge to fill in the blanks with their opinionated imaginations, an approach that is far from trusty. The mindset of mainstream modern science worships Homo sapiens like Hitler worshipped Aryans -- the master race -- whilst the holy species rips the planet to shreds right before their eyes. For 300,000 years, Neanderthals had the good manners to remain in balance with life, as did most of our ancestors. Good manners are important.

The whims of Ice Age climate patterns are the primary reason why you and I are not gorgeous, sexy, brilliant Neanderthals today, admiring a passing group of wooly rhinos, in a healthy world where bison far outnumber people. Finlayson's book, The Humans Who Went Extinct, convinced me to reconsider my perception of the human journey. Not many books do that anymore.

The era we live in, the 10,000 years of civilization, human domination, and ecocide, is but an eye blink in the long human journey. Our era is a freak, because the climate has remained relatively warm and stable for an amazingly long time. The pattern of the last 70,000 years has been a roller coaster of surprising climate shifts, from milder & wetter, to colder & drier. Shifts could occur within a single lifetime.

When the glaciers grew, sea levels plunged, forests shrank, countless animals died, and some went extinct. The deer and hippos fled or died, and were replaced by wooly mammoths, wooly rhinos, musk ox, and reindeer. Sea levels 30,000 years ago were 120 meters (400 feet) lower than today. You could walk from England to Holland.

The Younger Dryas cold snap lasted a thousand years, and ended 11,600 years ago. Warm weather melted the glaciers, life migrated northward, forests returned, and the land was filled with abundant megafauna. This was the last waltz for many cold-tolerant megafauna. The breezes were filled with the yummy aroma of sizzling mammoth meat.

In the Middle East, the Natufian culture was developing a sedentary way of life that majored in harvesting the abundant wild cereal seeds. Within a thousand years, folks were experimenting with the dangerous juju of cultivation. Tragically, they could never begin to imagine the unintended consequences of their cleverness.

Many have pointed to agriculture as the father of our disaster. Lately, I've been more inclined to point to tool addiction. Hominids were the only apes to move out of the forests and survive. The savannah offered immense amounts of meat, but it was almost impossible to acquire it with just bare hands. Oh-oh!

Once you get started with innovation, is it possible to stop? Yes. The macaques of south Asia break open shellfish with stone axes -- they have been tool addicts for ages, but their excellent manners and beautiful small brains protected them from being flushed down the toilet by the Technology Fairy.

The ancestors of the chimps evolved large canine teeth for dining on meat, whilst early hominids developed meat-processing tools instead. Baboons hunt small animals without weapons. Tool-free small-brained monkeys of the American tropics eat a wide variety of jungle critters.

Could large-brained humans ever comprehend the healthy consequences of living tool-free, like the monkeys? There is something deliciously appealing about the notion of living in harmony for millions of years without psych meds and cell phones.

And now, the plot thickens. The Ice Ages did not hammer Africa, Australia, or India. These southern folks continued living in the traditional human manner, as low density, low impact hunter-gatherers. Northerners, on the other hand, stumbled onto a new and dangerous path.

Almost everyone has seen an image of the Venus of Willendorf. She was carved by a member of the Gravettian culture of early humans, which thrived across the chilly treeless plains of Europe, from 30,000 to 22,000 years ago. They were clever folks who loved reindeer stew. They lived in huts with frames made of mammoth bones, covered with hides. They made textiles, baskets, kilns, jewelry, and figurines. They painted the caves at Chauvet and Les Garennes.

Finlayson laments that we modern civilized folks suffer to this very day from the curse of the Gravettians, "who lost their own way and all sense of their Pleistocene heritage." It was these far-too-clever white folks who created the most diabolical invention of all time -- (gasp!) the storage pit.

Southern folks enjoyed a warm climate, and a year-round food supply. Most foods could not be stored, because they would soon spoil. The crazy Gravettians lived in a frigid climate, where all you could see in any direction was endless empty steppe-tundra. Food appeared occasionally, like when migrating herds of reindeer passed through. When they did, the Gravettians hunted like crazy, and stored surplus meat in pits that they had dug in the permafrost.

Finlayson referred to these pits as dangerous toys. "They had found ways of producing surplus, something almost impossible in warm climates, and with it emerged an unstoppable drive to increase rapidly in numbers." If some surplus was good, then more was better, and you could never have too much. Abundant food led to growing numbers and bad manners. Finlayson emphasizes that our nightmare actually began 30,000 years ago, and agriculture was merely its hideous grandchild.

Later, the weather warmed, and the megafauna were gone. Descendants of the Gravettians tried hunting small game for a while. They learned how to enslave herbivores, which led to domestication. Instead of storing meat in storage pits, they stored living critters in grassy prisons. Others began growing plants for food, and storing the harvest in granaries. By and by, ecosystems fell under human control. Agriculture opened the floodgates to explosive population growth. We embarked on an insane vision of "taming the future."

Countless cultures and species were blown off the stage by climate shifts. Finlayson insists that luck may be the most important factor in the evolutionary process. Oddly, if luck had made Neanderthals the winners, and they had the good manners not to invent psych meds and cell phones, and the world of today was an incredible paradise -- we'd still be long overdue for a turbulent climate shift.

Reading this book, I was impressed by the incredible resilience of life. Over and over again, forest ecosystems were wiped out and replaced with treeless ecosystems that later changed back to forest ecosystems. Countless species disappeared in this exciting tilt-a-whirl ride of climate shifts, and countless species adapted and evolved. Our ancestors nearly died out 73,500 years ago, following the Mount Toba eruption. A few thousand survived. Today we're at seven-point-something billion.

This is a small book, but it is jammed with information. We really can't know who we are, and where we came from, if we don't understand the turbulent sagas of the Ice Ages. The end of our entire way of life is just a climate shift away. In the past, it was a zigzag between cold and warm. Future zigzags seem likely to be between warm and roasting.

Finlayson impresses me on the quality of his research and theory. However, it soon becomes a dull dry read, because 80% of the book are long parts just about the environment. It needed to be more focused on ancient humans, and less on the ecological changes.

Homo sapiens neanderthalensis may be the title character, but his role is relatively supportive to Finlayson’s descriptively detailed narrative of human evolution. And it’s not so much ‘how’ humans evolved as it is ‘where’ they evolved, ‘when’ they evolved, and ‘why’ all that matters.

Let us forget the rather grandiose conceptualizations of our ancestral Out-Of-Africa exodus. We are an invasive rather than a migratory species. Finlayson frequently uses the Eurasian collared dove, another invasive species, as an analogy:

“…the collared doves settled in suitable areas in south-eastern Europe… Their offspring could not stay where the parents lived, so they moved a kilometer or two down the road to the next park. Like this, kilometer by kilometer, the birds got across Europe… There was no migration of collared doves; it was simply a demographically triggered geographical expansion.”

From there it is a somewhat awkward and slightly problematic leap to:

“…there was nothing particularly special about human geographical expansion in prehistory, and it most certainly was not a migration of peoples.”

Kudos to the author for equating hominid expansion to something as visually aesthetic as the collared dove. Personally, I would have opted for something less adorable like Australia’s cane toad or the brown tree snakes of Guam.

As it turns out, Finlayson is full of interesting and thought provoking ideas. Take for instance his theory on bipedalism:

“Orangutans share something with humans that gorillas and chimpanzees do not. All of them can stand upright but when chimpanzees and gorillas do so, the hind limbs are flexed. Orangutans and humans, on the other hand, stand on straight hind limbs. This way of walking on tree branches gives the orangutan great benefits.”

From there it is a somewhat awkward and slightly problematic leap to:

“…the old idea that walking on two feet started when our ancestors ventured away from the forest into the open savannahs no longer holds. It now looks likely that bipedal walking may have started on the trees themselves.”

It’s not that the author’s ideas are without merit. Quite the opposite. His theories are exceptional and plausible and intriguing. It is his leap-of-faith logic of progression that saps away some of his credence.

Where were we? Oh yes, I remember - the plight of the Neanderthals:

[SPOILER ALERT] It turns out that Finlayson’s hypothesis on the extinction of the Neanderthals is perhaps the least controversial thing in his book. He attributes their disappearance to a combination of factors, the least of which is the encroachment of modern humans. In his analysis, what little interbreeding there was between Neanderthals and so-called ‘modern humans’ was incidental and inconsequential. It was climate change, their calorie-dependent physical build, their proclivity for ambush hunting and ambush hunting technology, and an unhealthy dose of sheer bad luck that did them in. From what paleoanthropologists can discern from the fossil record, Neanderthal populations were declining before Homo sapiens appeared on the scene. Their demise might have been accelerated by the competition and encroachment, but their fate was already sealed.

“Irrespective of the position that we might take regarding the causes of the extinction of the Neanderthals, it is undeniable that by the time the Ancestors reached their strongholds in southern Europe and Asia these ancient peoples of Eurasia were already on the way out.”

This quote from the last chapter reads as Finlayson venting a little steam and is probably my favorite passage in the whole book:

“[The Agricultural Revolution] marked the start of the illusion of progress towards a world of unsustainable growth, a dream that has turned into a nightmare as we procrastinate today while the current state and the future of our planet hang in the balance as a result of our voracity. How could we have reached such an unhealthy state of affairs? The answer lies in the way in which we got to the present, not as evolutionary superstars but as pests that invaded every nook and cranny that became available.”

This book covers the evolution of several human like Primates. It really gives information on at least three closely related Primates that settled in different areas at different times. The ice age in Europe had a very profound effect on the distribution of Primates. There was competition for food in these areas and better hunters probably were able to provide food for their groups, abut neanderthals were probably not as good as our species. Neanderthals seem to have been eliminated in most areas but managed to survive longer in southern areas espedcially in caves in sourthern Spain. There is a lot of speculation in this book because there is not real way to rigorously test some of the ideas in this book.

Great reading.. Easy to read book with lots of interesting facts about Neanderthals.
Through this book I came to understand that the difference between survival and extinction involves many factors including a good deal of luck in terms of environmental conditions..

Wanted to like it. Could have been done in maybe 30 pages rather than an entire book. Lots of repetition