PEOPLING

The Last Neanderthals

~40,000 years ago

Palaeolithic · Upper Palaeolithic · Last glacial

After more than three hundred thousand years in Eurasia, Neanderthals disappear from the record around 40,000 years ago, at different moments in different regions, after overlapping with incoming Homo sapiens for roughly 2,600 to 5,400 years. No single catastrophe is in evidence: small populations, a demanding climate and dilution into larger newcomer groups each seem to have played a part.

Why it matters

A whole way of being human ended, and the manner of it matters. Millennia of coexistence leave room for exchange, of genes certainly, perhaps of techniques and ornaments; part of the Neanderthal genome walked on in the newcomers and is in most people today. Their end is also a mirror held up to our species: the survivor's story is written by demography as much as by any superiority.

Dating & uncertainty

Bayesian modelling of forty re-dated sites puts the end of the Mousterian, the Neanderthal toolkit, between 41,030 and 39,260 calibrated years everywhere in Europe, with regional differences inside that window. Claims of much later survivals, notably in Iberia and Belgium, have repeatedly dissolved when the bones were re-dated with cleaner chemistry.

Sources

1. Higham et al. (2014), Nature · The timing and spatiotemporal patterning of Neanderthal disappearancedoi:10.1038/nature13621
2. Devièse et al. (2021), PNAS · Reevaluating the timing of Neanderthal disappearance in Northwest Europedoi:10.1073/pnas.2022466118
3. Djakovic, Key & Soressi (2022), Scientific Reports · Optimal linear estimation models predict 1400-2900 years of overlap between Homo sapiens and Neandertals prior to their disappearance from France and northern Spaindoi:10.1038/s41598-022-19162-z

Our species’ history as one day

20:57:083 h 3 min before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day