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A review by gon8go
The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived by Clive Finlayson
2.0
the cover and title of this book are misleading. If you are looking for a book about Neanderthals this isn't really it; there are really only a couple of chapters specifically about them. mostly he gets up on a soap box about how anthropologists have it all wrong and draw quick conclusions from very little actual data.
He feels(based on suspiciously little data) that instead of neandetthal ancestors coming from africa 300,000 yrars ago and our ancestors coming from africa 50,000 years ago that there were different migrations and small pockets of dead-end evolutionare experiments all over europe. He also feels that instead of our ancestors wiping out neanderthals because of superior ability, it was pure luck that we lived and not them. the thrust of his arguement was that neanderthals were stalking hunters that would hunt one animal at a time and need no help from a large community. light projectile weapons were useless to them because of all the trees where they lived.
On the flip side our ancestors adapted to the open steppe (huge grassy plains that covered europe) and hunted in packs like wolves. they needed projectiles and large communities to survive. so as the ice age made the woods smaller and the steppe bigger, neanderthals were pushed out. if it would have warmed instead it may have been us being studied by them today. only because of random chance. he ends on a cynical note saying that eventually our kind will die out too and something else will take our place.
He feels(based on suspiciously little data) that instead of neandetthal ancestors coming from africa 300,000 yrars ago and our ancestors coming from africa 50,000 years ago that there were different migrations and small pockets of dead-end evolutionare experiments all over europe. He also feels that instead of our ancestors wiping out neanderthals because of superior ability, it was pure luck that we lived and not them. the thrust of his arguement was that neanderthals were stalking hunters that would hunt one animal at a time and need no help from a large community. light projectile weapons were useless to them because of all the trees where they lived.
On the flip side our ancestors adapted to the open steppe (huge grassy plains that covered europe) and hunted in packs like wolves. they needed projectiles and large communities to survive. so as the ice age made the woods smaller and the steppe bigger, neanderthals were pushed out. if it would have warmed instead it may have been us being studied by them today. only because of random chance. he ends on a cynical note saying that eventually our kind will die out too and something else will take our place.