Just saw this on ArsTechnica. It's a writeup on an article in Nature on new evidence that shows that the disappearance of the Neandethal species may not have been directly a result of climate change. The full article costs $30 to read, but the Ars writeup is here.

Anyway, it piqued my interest having just watched the BBC documentary on Neanderthals discussed in the other thread..

Not with an academic affiliation....

Click to view attachment

I saw this headline but didn't think it very interesting as I've never heard climate change as a proposed explanation for their disappearance?

Apeman

I remember a Discovery Channel show where this was proposed, I think. I just remember they had a guy who was short, barrel-chested along with a taller, leaner guy and they did a study on heat retention on both of them. If I recall right, the shorter guy did better retaining heat in the chest, nearer the heart, than the other guy. Which they theorized was better for colder climates.
Sorry I don't have details, and gave a very non-scientific description. I try to get by in life on my looks anyway.

Cool. I have a feeling you're not supposed to do this though.. (right-click -> Save As.. before anything happens )

I think Squonksquatch is referring to a BBC, not Discovery Channel documentary... The documentary concluded that Neanderthals died out because the climate changed in Europe and their cold weather adaptations were less of an advantage, while at the same time woodland started turning into open grassland, where they were out-competed by faster, more agile and energy-efficient Homo Sapiens.

The documentary was questionable as it only presented one view, but it's obviously a commonly accepted one.

Robo,

What happened to your "Hi-Res BBC documentaries for Free Download" thread you posted recently? I watched the Neandertal one and it was fanastic. I downloaded all 689 MBs of the file and watched it on the VLC media player you recommended--it had better quality than my tv! So I came back to get the others..... NO THREAD!

What gives?

moregon deleted it because there was some question about whether that site had the right to distribute the videos... as such, i fear for this thread after Apeman's link...

So the lack of climate change got them, and climate change will be our doom. Will the good news just never stop!

Look, just don't.

Ah... my fault, sorry.

I have seen that particular video of the Neanderthals before. It was very interesting, especially how the guy reconstructed one and how many fossils he needed to do it. That Neanderthal was a powerful hunter with his thrusting spear and they made a very good argument that open country likely favored moderns because of our longer range weapons and better build for long distance running. We could keep up with herds and hunt even in the more open country. Even if it wasn't climate change that reduced the forest, it makes sense that modern humans themselves could be responsible for clearing much of the forests. There are several ancient people that regularly burn forests to make it more open and more suitable for our lifestyle. Perhaps that, more than the climate was responsible for moderns eventually penetrating the deeper forests favored by Neanderthal in their theory.

I don't think so, we do this all the time with scientific papers. It's no different than me making photocopies from a journal I subscribe to for you or anyone else that wants one...I think? I'm guessing this falls under non-commercial, educational distribution, but then again I've had to go through all kinds of licensing to put syllabuses together.

Could we get a ruling on this?... before I get hauled in for trying to help better inform the bigfoot community?

Apeman

Thanks for the link to the PDF, Apeman. Very interesting and informative, particularly as to analytical techniques in paleochronology, though I'm not convinced that climate change had all that much more to do with neanderthal extinction, but I'm sure it had something to do with it, for how could it not?
Regarding those dramatic recreations we see courtesy of science oriented productions; these programs on neanderhals versus cro-magnon are amusing and provocative but primarily they are imaginative and with a Euro-centric bias. Notice how they always seem to focus on this interaction as it occured in Europe. Why? The relative abundance of ancient hominid fossils is more a coincidence of geology and demographics rather than anything so specific to our ancestors. It should also be noted that the climatic pattern as the global climate shifted from ice-age to interglacial period, is not the same everywhere and indeed, Europe's pattern is a little odd due to its topography and geography. In fact over the majority of the northern continental regions, grasslands (the mammoth steppes) were changing to the northern boreal forests, taiga and tundra. I've sometimes seen historical measurement of the advance of trees or their retreat, depending on the point the climate modeller is trying to make, to be interpreted one way or another. It's a complex process and advances and retreats are usually achieved within the context of a complex mosaic of conditions and communities, and the kind of communitiy is largely controlled by the availability of liquid water at critical times of they year.
I don't doubt that the creators of these films are doing their best to make their hypothesis seem probable and scientifically based, but it might be interesting to think about how the fossil record would be interpreted were the conditions for preservation better in other parts of the ancestral hominids' ranges which we know were vast in comparison to the complex little jumble of cave blessed Western Euarasia.

While i would like to agree, i can't help feeling that it's little different from posting a link to a documentary, also for non-commercial, educational purposes...

It would be nice if there was at least a consistent policy here.

Why not?

Is the "climate change" discussion all one way?

I'm told it's too political. Gee, I wonder which side turned climate change discussions into political discussions?

Figure the fact that there are weather people on the news programming.

I guess...........

My guess is that each side will blame the other...

I blame your mom.

My mom will blame me. She always liked my brother more than me ...

Are you the eldest?

If so, you are definately to blame for global warming.

Shame on you!

I know it's heresy but I blame the SUN.