Sept. 12, 2007 — The great whodunnit of paleontology has been given a new twist with findings that our enigmatic cousins, the Neanderthals, were in all likelihood not killed off by a mini-Ice Age, as some authorities contend.
Neanderthals, smaller and squatter than Homo sapiens sapiens, as anatomically modern man is called, lived in parts of Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East for around 170,000 years.
All traces of these mysterious hominids vanish from the record around 28,000-30,000 years ago, and the cause of this disappearance has sparked a fierce duel of opinion among paleontologists.
One theory is that the Neanderthals were wiped out by a sudden cold snap.
Alone, their numbers depleted, the Neanderthals eked out their final moments in caves in modern-day Spain and Gibraltar, goes this hypothesis.
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They amounted to no more than a stubby, unsuccessful branch on the human family tree. The duty of continuing the species of Homo fell to us.
One of the problems of exploring the Neanderthal saga, though, is to get an accurate date for when all this may have happened.
The main dating technique is to test fossils for levels of a background isotope in the environment, carbon 14.
Carbon 14 decays at a fixed rate, so its present-day levels can be used to calculate the fossil's age. It is rather like a clock that works backwards, indicating the time when the creature was alive.
