www.guardian.co.uk...
Neanderthals died out in Western Europe after a surge of modern humans arrived from Africa and made them a minority in their own land,
researchers claim.
The swarm of Homo sapiens onto the continent more than 40,000 years ago left the Neanderthals, who had thrived in the frigid conditions for 300
millennia, outnumbered by a massive 10 to one.
According to the authors, a combination of numerical, technical and social superiority eventually led to the displacement of the Neanderthals...and
eventually to their extinction (perhaps aided by severe climactic conditions as their end neared).
Here is a statement that I find interesting/suspicious...
Faced with this kind of competition, the Neanderthals seem to have retreated initially into more marginal and less attractive regions of the
continent and eventually, within a space of at most a hundred thousand years, for their populations to have declined to extinction
.
A hundred thousand years...really? It took the invading hordes perhaps
100,000 years to displace their vastly inferior human competitors?
When the Europeans invaded North America, it took...what...100 years to decimate the Native population and culture. When they made it to South
America...how long did it take to completely overcome the local peoples?
Any invasion, or mass migration, of people from one region to another is usually no more than a one or two generation struggle...with the stronger
forces winning the day in fairly rapid fashion - especially in circumstances where there would have been fierce competition for food and other
resources (as the authors suggest).
When studying artifacts, bones etc. scientists always seem to describe things in terms of enormous spans of time...hundreds of thousands or million of
years. If we look at recorded history, enormous changes...on continental scales...have occurred over time spans of a mere "hundreds of years".
Technology, especially during the last 600 years or so has progressed steadily...now exponentially.
If we are to believe the time frames prescribed by scholars of humankind's past...humans went spans of thousands of years without making any kind of
meaningful improvements to methods, materials, the sciences, etc. I consider this highly unlikely.
And to suggest that it may have taken Homo Sapiens as long as 100,000 years to establish their dominance over Neanderthal Man, just seems to ignore
everything that we know about human conflict since we started keeping records.