Why did the Neanderthals disappear?

TSEs are also known as prion diseases, a communicable disease where the infectious agent is a malformed protein that replicates by imprinting and transforming other proteins. Most TSEs manifest in the host’s neurological tissues because he or she ate infected nervous tissue. Ultimately, the host’s tissues degenerate and lead to serious problems, most often death. In anthropology, one form of TSEs has been well documented, the spread and eradication of kuru in the Fore from Papua New Guinea.

Academic interest in what are being described as drowned Stone Age hunting grounds is likely to increase dramatically after the discovery of 28 Neanderthal flint axes on the sea bed off the East Anglian coast.

Detailed archaeological research at the bottom of the North Sea would be likely to solve a host of Stone Age mysteries. It should help establish when Britain was recolonised by humans after a 100,000-year uninhabited period. It may also reveal for the first time the full technological capabilities of Neanderthal Man, because preservation on and in the sea bed is extremely good. Wooden, stone and bone implements have almost certainly survived.

New research adds to the evidence that chance, rather than natural selection, best explains why the skulls of modern humans and ancient Neanderthals evolved differently. The findings may alter how anthropologists think about human evolution.

"A take-home message may be that we should reconsider the idea that all morphological (physical) changes are due to natural selection, and instead consider that some of them may be due to genetic drift," Weaver said. "This may have interesting implications for our understanding of human evolution."

In his nonfiction work he focuses on aspects of cryptozoology, especially hominoid cryptids such as bigfoot and yeti. Pye developed these themes in Everything You Know Is Wrong, in 1998. Here he claims that these animals are Earth's only indigenous bipedal primates, and that early fossil hominoids such as Neandertals and Australopithecines are not intermediates in human evolution.