Humans’ Sheer Numbers Enabled Europe Dominance 40,000 Years Ago

Humans may not have been more aggressive than the Neanderthals they replaced in Europe 40,000 years ago. They were more prolific, growing their population ten times faster, a study suggests.

Better tools, food storage techniques and, importantly, stronger social bonding helped humans multiply at a faster rate, helping to drive the Neanderthals into extinction over a 15,000- year period, according to a study in the journal Science.

The researchers used new methods to assess human population growth, measuring the number and density of skeletal remains, living places and tools in a 75,000 square kilometer location in western France. Neanderthals, who had been in control of Europe for almost 300,000 years, rapidly went extinct after humans arrived, said Paul Mellars, lead author of the study.

“There were not only more of them but they were living in larger social groups of people living and acting together,” said Mellars, a professor of prehistory at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. in a phone interview. “The culture of the humans was more elaborate, with superior firepower, like the Europeans that later invaded North America.”

During a 15,000-year period that began 55,000 years ago, the number of human living sites more than doubled, researchers found. A statistical analysis led them to conclude that there was a tenfold increase in human population during the period.

From Africa

Humans, who came from Africa, took hold in Europe during the transition from the Chatelperronian to the Aurignacian periods around 45,000 years ago, Mellars said. There were 108 human dwelling sites during the period, compared with 30 Neanderthal ones. The density of tools and the number of animal remains used by modern humans was at least twice as many as those used by Neanderthals.

That shows humans “must have been doing something dramatically more efficient in terms of extracting food from the environment,” Mellars said.

Though the exact number of each population is nearly impossible to know, there may have been several hundred Neanderthals in the area studied by the researcher, compared with several thousand humans, Mellars said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Oliver Renick in New York at orenick@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Reg Gale at rgale5@bloomberg.net.

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