Hominids survived longer than believed

PARIS: A century and a half after the first Neanderthal bones were coaxed from a German lime quarry, new evidence suggests that these puzzling hominids survived thousands of years longer than anyone thought.

With Europe in the grip of an Ice Age and with their smarter cousins, Homo sapiens, spreading across the continent, the last Neanderthals holed up in a refuge on the balmy southern tip of Europe until their lineage withered away, a study says.

Homo neanderthals may have drawn his final breath as recently as 24,000 years ago, say its authors, an international team of palaeontologists.

Previous estimates have put the extinction of the Neanderthals around 30,000-33,000 years ago. But the date is fiercely debated, as is an even greater mystery: who, or what, killed them?

The new piece in the puzzle comes from artefacts found at a site on Gibraltar called Gorham’s Cave, where Neanderthal stone tools were discovered more than 50 years ago. Further excavations of the cave floor between 1999 and 2005 have exposed the remains of hearths where Neanderthals, known to be skilled with flints, would keep a fire.

The researchers used a technique called accelerator mass spectrometry to date pieces of charcoal found in the hearths, and conclude Neanderthals definitely lived there until 28,000 years years ago “and possibly as recently as 24,000 years” ago.

Wrongly lampooned in popular humour as moronic grunters, the Neanderthals had the smarts to choose an excellent site for their redoubt, according to the paper, published on Thursday in Nature.

Natural light penetrated deep within the cave’s walls and a high ceiling allowed smoke to ventilate. The location, too, was a winner.

While northerly latitudes of Europe remained locked in a deep and hostile chill, the warmer Mediterranean rim offered a good chance of survival for hunter-gatherers like the Neanderthals.

As to the great whodunnit of palaeontology, the paper discounts the theory that these Neanderthals were annihilated by H sapiens in the competition for food and territory.

Evidence of stone-age technology at Malaga, about 100 kilometres (60 miles) east of Gibraltar, shows that anatomically modern man had ventured into the neighbourhood at the time when the Neanderthals lived in Gorham Cave.

This suggests that for several thousand years the region was a “mosaic” of remnant Neanderthals and pioneering H sapiens living in thinly-scattered communities.

Another theory to explain the disappearance of the Neanderthals is that they did not disappear — not genetically, at any rate.

Under this hypothesis, Neanderthals and H sapiens co-mingled. Far from being a dead branch of the human tree, the Neanderthals may even have bequeathed some of the traits in the H sapiens genome that we see today.