The disappearance of the Neanderthals
- Date
- c. 50,000 – 40,000 years ago
- Category
- Social & demographic
- Region
- Europe and West Asia
- Era
- Prehistory
- Significance
Having occupied Europe and western Asia for hundreds of thousands of years, the Neanderthals vanished from the fossil and archaeological record around 40,000 years ago, shortly after Homo sapiens expanded across Eurasia.
In northwestern Europe Neanderthals had largely disappeared by roughly 44,000 to 40,000 years ago, with some evidence for late persistence in refuge areas such as the Iberian Peninsula. Radiocarbon dating suggests modern humans and Neanderthals overlapped in parts of Europe for perhaps a few thousand years, a window during which interbreeding occurred. The causes of the extinction remain debated and were probably multiple: competition with expanding modern human populations for the same resources, small and fragmented Neanderthal populations vulnerable to inbreeding and demographic shocks, abrupt climate deteriorations that degraded their habitats, and possibly assimilation through interbreeding. Rather than a single catastrophe, most researchers now picture a drawn-out decline. Crucially, Neanderthals did not disappear entirely: their genes survive in present-day non-African populations, so a part of their lineage persists within our own species.
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Related social & demographic events
- Anatomically modern Homo sapiens appears in Africac. 300,000 years ago
- Rise of the Yamnaya Culture and Steppe Pastoralismc. 3300 BCE
- The Natufian culture and the first sedentary hunter-gatherersc. 15,000 – 11,500 years ago (c. 13,000–9500 BCE)
- Uruk becomes the world's first cityc. 4000–3100 BCE
- Arrival of farming in Britain and Ireland and the rise of megalithsc. 4000 BCE
- Çatalhöyük and the great Neolithic towns of Anatoliac. 7100 – 5950 BCE
Further reading
The wider story
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Global best-seller on how our species, its populations and societies remade the world.
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