"The Humans Who Went Extinct"

(Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived)
-by clive finlayson
2009
How would you like to meet a humynoid species bigger-brained, sturdier of build, and more enduring than our own?
Yikes!
Say hello, neanderthals.
Clive is a professor, museum director, and evolutionary ecologist, and the greatest accomplishment of his wonderful book is deflating a goodly portion of humyn arrogance. We have long fancied ourselves the pinnacle of life, more awesome than any creature ever, an unstoppable force of nature. Even when we talk about the unfolding planetary ecological apocalypse we've caused, there's an unspoken element of perverse pride for many. Come on, you know it's true.
We be the baddest of the bad, dad?
Well, no. Oh to be sure, we dominate this planet like no species ever before, but the image of us as irresistible conquistadors from time immemorial is horse hockey, sayeth clive. He rolls out a compelling case, painting a picture of primate prehistory which is far less monolithic and inevitable than the one to which we cling. And the archaeological/ecological evidence supports him. He shows a world in which many humynoid species and sub-species lived concurrently...and all too often died out, not because they weren't successful, but sometimes because they were too successful, such that they couldn't survive the immense changes of the past hundred thousand years, as ice ages came and went. He shows us how technologies and art arose, then died out, then arose again (and again and again?), with neanderthals, proto-ancestors, and ancestors not conquering each other, but probably just copying each other. We eradicated the neanderthals? Not bloody likely. And we now have proof that other hominids survived as recently as four thousand years ago. The 300,000 years that neanderthals roamed makes our 100,000 a bit puny...
Much of this is about the difference between conservatives and innovators. Conservatives are beautifully adapted, while innovators live on the edge, in a more scrambling, tenuous existence. But even with that, there's nothing inevitable about innovators surviving when you understand how grand ecological change can be. It happened to be us who survived, but it could have gone any one of a thousand other ways (including of course, no primate survival at all). Clive embraces the theory that our brain growth is an offshoot of the complicated social behaviors needed for group hunting. Much of his argument focuses on our development as meat-eaters...perhaps too much so, for as he admits, meat-eating habits survive in the archaeological record far more profusely than other behaviors. Most of the later middle chapters get bogged down in detail, so if your patience wanes, reading the first few chapters and the last will provide all the big-picture understanding you might want.
A fantastic, necessary read.