Читать книгу World History For Dummies - Peter Haugen - Страница 37

Neanderthals lived over a wide area stretching from today’s Belgium southward to Spain and eastward around the Mediterranean Sea to Turkey. This big-brained branch of the family arose about 150,000 years ago in Europe. After swapping some genes with our species, Neanderthals died out perhaps as recently as 28,000 years ago.

While Neanderthals were still in their prime, glaciers receded, and anatomically modern folks migrated into the Neanderthal part of the world. The two kinds of humans coexisted for thousands of years, both leaving evidence of their camps among the same hills, valleys, and caves. It’s perhaps inevitable that they interbred, but nobody knows how well they got along. Did modern humans wipe out their Neanderthal cousins over centuries of brutal genocide? Did the newcomers have better survival skills?

If it bothers you that Neanderthals mated with people like us, it shouldn’t. They had big brains — maybe bigger than ours — and they did some rather modern things, such as burying their dead with flowers and ochre (a reddish clay used like body paint). They made tools and art, too, although some researchers argue that they may have borrowed ideas from their more “modern” neighbors.

Neanderthals lived over a wide geographical area, but not as wide as that inhabited in a relatively short time by their successors. Our kind evolved in Africa, where earlier hominids also originated. Then they migrated on their two spindly legs not just into the Mideast and Europe, where the Neanderthals had been coping with ice ages, but over all the other continents except Antarctica.