Neanderthals thrived for some 250,000 years
Neanderthals thrived for some 250,000 years throughout Europe and western Asia by successfully exploiting whatever environment they happened to live in. Scholars typically thought of these early settlers as akin to the Inuit of today — clusters of people living at the northernmost edge of human range. “The new paper highlights the extent to which our view of them as cold-adapted, steppe-tundra, big-game hunters is skewed,” said João Zilhão, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Lisbon who was not involved in the study. “The truth is that they were no more representative of present-day humans as a whole than those Neanderthals were of Eurasian Neanderthals as a whole.” It is now accepted that the more typical Neanderthal was one who lived in southern Europe through the Ice Age and in central Europe during interglacial periods, as epitomized by Neumark-Nord. About 86,000 to 106,000 years ago, for instance, fisher-hunter- gatherers occupied the Gruta da Figueira Brava si...