atmosphere. It would have dropped summer temperatures by as much as twenty degrees Fahrenheit, making a volcanic winter several years long. The modern humans, adapted to warm conditions in Africa, would have been ill-prepared for this. Plant and animal life would have
declined precipitously, adding hunger to the rigors of cold weather. Population would have crashed, perhaps as much as 99 percent, leaving isolated, widely spaced families or groups scattered across Asia, the survivors scratching for survival. Established trade routes would have been lined by the bones of those who had once prospered.
In fact mankind may have become an insignificant part of the landscape, extinct through much of it, as repeated severe climate fluctuations made mini-ice ages and beat them back. Similarly horrendous volcanic events occurred in America, encouraging the ice age. We have seen nothing of this magnitude in recorded history; Mt. Pinatubo dropped global temperature by only one degree, mitigating a record heating trend. The European Neandertals, however, were cold adapted; this was their kind of weather, and they expanded after taking a similar hit at the time of the Toba eruption. Until new waves emerged from Africa to assimilate the fragments and reunify the species. One of these may have been the Cro-Magnons, 50,000 years ago. Only then did the moderns resume their progress and take Europe.
This chapter shows an earlier and unsuccessful effort to penetrate Neandertal land. The more advanced folk were moving out to the fringes, encountering the physiologically identical but socially primitive prior occupants, and their impact was insufficient to transform that society sufficiently. So the tougher Neandertals prevailed, being physically better adapted to the rigorous climate of Europe. There does seem to have been some trade between the two peoples, but no interbreeding; they were different species who surely were capable of crossbreed sex, and would have tried it by raping captive women. But not of reproduction, as recent DNA typing has established. The last common ancestor of Neandertal and modern mankind seems to have been about 600,000 years ago; thereafter they went their own ways, genetically.
Why didnât the Neandertals advance their technology when they saw it in trade items, such as the tighter clothing the moderns made? For this we must understand Neandertal psychology, which is both unknown and perhaps self-evident. We resemble them in many ways. They may have been the original conservative âIf it was good enough for my grandfather, itâs good enough for meâ folk, resistant to change,
as their stone artifacts demonstrate. We do the same in certain respects. Consider the typewriter keyboard: I, being a progressive thinker, use the superior Dvorak layout. Most others refuse to change from the designed-to-be-inefficient QWERTY layout. It would pay the rest of the world to follow my example and change to the clearly better keyboard, but like the Neandertals, it simply does not. It is a similar story in weights and measures, as much of the English-speaking world clings to confusing archaic systems instead of converting to the efficient metric system. So we are not so different. Had the Neandertals been open to change, they would have been formidable indeed. But they thought they didnât need to.
Yet it may be more than that. The brain of Neandertal was as large as that of mankind, but differently configured. He did not think the same way we did. One conjecture is that he was short in the reasoning section and long in the memory section. He may have had a virtually eidetic memory for the relevant things of his landscape, with a specific name and location for every tree with edible fruit, every patch of ground where edible tubers grew, every bend in the river where fish were plentiful, and every mountain slope where berries ripened in season. So where we would say, âI found ripe apples on a tree beside
declined precipitously, adding hunger to the rigors of cold weather. Population would have crashed, perhaps as much as 99 percent, leaving isolated, widely spaced families or groups scattered across Asia, the survivors scratching for survival. Established trade routes would have been lined by the bones of those who had once prospered.
In fact mankind may have become an insignificant part of the landscape, extinct through much of it, as repeated severe climate fluctuations made mini-ice ages and beat them back. Similarly horrendous volcanic events occurred in America, encouraging the ice age. We have seen nothing of this magnitude in recorded history; Mt. Pinatubo dropped global temperature by only one degree, mitigating a record heating trend. The European Neandertals, however, were cold adapted; this was their kind of weather, and they expanded after taking a similar hit at the time of the Toba eruption. Until new waves emerged from Africa to assimilate the fragments and reunify the species. One of these may have been the Cro-Magnons, 50,000 years ago. Only then did the moderns resume their progress and take Europe.
This chapter shows an earlier and unsuccessful effort to penetrate Neandertal land. The more advanced folk were moving out to the fringes, encountering the physiologically identical but socially primitive prior occupants, and their impact was insufficient to transform that society sufficiently. So the tougher Neandertals prevailed, being physically better adapted to the rigorous climate of Europe. There does seem to have been some trade between the two peoples, but no interbreeding; they were different species who surely were capable of crossbreed sex, and would have tried it by raping captive women. But not of reproduction, as recent DNA typing has established. The last common ancestor of Neandertal and modern mankind seems to have been about 600,000 years ago; thereafter they went their own ways, genetically.
Why didnât the Neandertals advance their technology when they saw it in trade items, such as the tighter clothing the moderns made? For this we must understand Neandertal psychology, which is both unknown and perhaps self-evident. We resemble them in many ways. They may have been the original conservative âIf it was good enough for my grandfather, itâs good enough for meâ folk, resistant to change,
as their stone artifacts demonstrate. We do the same in certain respects. Consider the typewriter keyboard: I, being a progressive thinker, use the superior Dvorak layout. Most others refuse to change from the designed-to-be-inefficient QWERTY layout. It would pay the rest of the world to follow my example and change to the clearly better keyboard, but like the Neandertals, it simply does not. It is a similar story in weights and measures, as much of the English-speaking world clings to confusing archaic systems instead of converting to the efficient metric system. So we are not so different. Had the Neandertals been open to change, they would have been formidable indeed. But they thought they didnât need to.
Yet it may be more than that. The brain of Neandertal was as large as that of mankind, but differently configured. He did not think the same way we did. One conjecture is that he was short in the reasoning section and long in the memory section. He may have had a virtually eidetic memory for the relevant things of his landscape, with a specific name and location for every tree with edible fruit, every patch of ground where edible tubers grew, every bend in the river where fish were plentiful, and every mountain slope where berries ripened in season. So where we would say, âI found ripe apples on a tree beside
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