Stone Tools are Not the Reason Why Humans Survived the Neanderthals

What caused the Neanderthals to die off while human survived and thrived? That's a question that scientists have been tackling for years. Now, they've discovered that innovative hunting weapons carried by humans may not be the reason why humans survived the Neanderthals.

In this latest study, the researchers looked at innovative stone weapons used by humans about 42,000 to 34,000 years ago. In the past, researchers believed that weapon innovation allowed humans to spread out of Africa to Europe. However, the latest findings reveal that the innovation was not the driving force.

"We're not so special, I don't think we survived the Neanderthals because of technological competence," said Seiji Kadowaki, first author of the new study, in a news release. "Our work is related to the processes behind the global spread of modern humans, and specifically the cultural impact of the modern humans who migrated to Europe."

Anatomically modern humans expanded the geographic area that they inhabited out of Africa during a period of time that stretched from 55,000 to 40,000 years ago. This event made a huge impact on the biological origins of the people living today.

Previous models have shown that anatomically modern humans were special in the way they behaved and thought. These models considered technological and cultural innovation as the reason humans survived and Neanderthals did not. By studying stone tools, the researchers found that the creation of small stone points as tips for hunting weapons actually doesn't match up with the timeline.

The researchers found that there's the possibility that stone points appeared in Europe 3,000 years earlier than in the Levant, which is a historical area in west Asia.

"We looked at the basic timeline revealed by similar stone points, and it shows that humans were using them in Europe before they appeared in the Levant-the opposite of what we'd expect if the innovation had led to the humans' migration from Africa to Europe," said Kadowaki. "Our new findings mean that the research community now needs to reconsider the assumption that our ancestors moved to Europe and succeeded where Neanderthals failed because of cultural and technological innovations brought from Africa or west Africa."

The findings are published in the Journal of Human Evolution.

For more great science stories and general news, please visit our sister site, Headlines and Global News (HNGN).