The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals died out and we survived

ISBN-13: 9780199239191 / Angielski / Miękka / 2010 / 256 str.

Clive Finlayson

Opis

Hailed by Dan Agin in The Huffington Post as "fascinating...electrifying...an apocalyptic vision that puts a chill down one's back," this provocative book offers a new perspective on the extinction of the Neanderthals. Today, we think of Neanderthals as crude and clumsy, easily driven to extinction by the lithe, smart humans who came out of Africa some 100,000 years ago. But Clive Finlayson reminds us that the Neanderthals were another kind of human, and their culture was not so very different from that of our own ancestors. In this book, he presents a wider view of the events that led to the migration of the moderns into Europe, what might have happened during the contact between the two populations, and what finally drove the Neanderthals to extinction. It is a view that considers climate, ecology, and migrations of populations, as well as culture and interaction. His conclusion is that the destiny of the Neanderthals was sealed by ecological factors--in short, a major climate change--and it was a matter of luck that we survived while they perished.

Recenzje

Lively, revelatory, and salutary book.

O autorze

Clive Finlayson is Director of the Gibraltar Museum and adjunct professor at the University of Toronto. He is an evolutionary ecologist with a DPhil from the University of Oxford. For the past fifteen years he has combined his ecological work with birds with leading an international multidisciplinary project that has focused on excavations of the Pleistocene caves in Gibraltar, especially Gorham's Cave, recently confirmed as the site of the last Neanderthals on the planet. His previous publication was Neanderthals and Modern Humans: An Ecological and Evolutionary Perspective (CUP, 2004).