C. Duarte, J. Maurício , P. Pettitt, P. Souto , E. Trinkaus, H. van der Plicht  , and J. Zilhão
The early Upper Paleolithic human skeleton from the Abrigo do Lagar Velho (Portugal) and modern human emergence in Iberia,
PNAS 96, 13 (Jun 22, 1999) 7604-7609.  
How two top predators 'did it'
Adapted for the Internet from:

Why God Doesn't Exist

    1.0   The extinction of experts

    Most people have the bad habit of supporting their beliefs and conclusions by invoking authority.
    Therefore, if you have a predisposition to believe that Neanderthal disappeared because of climate
    change, you quote someone like Stringer. Conversely, if you feel that Neanderthal disappeared by
    intermarrying with modern humans you quote 'experts' like Trinkaus or Wolpoff:

    " Erik Trinkaus is considered by many to be the world's most influential scholar
       of Neandertal biology and evolution." [1]

    This bad habit makes it necessary that I dispose of the 'expertise' issue right here and now if we are to
    level the playing field: There are no experts on the subject of extinction! If the experts knew what caused
    the extinction of every species on Earth, they wouldn't still be arguing amongst themselves. Indeed, you
    should begin by questioning their knowledge about bones. If it becomes evident that the alleged 'expert'
    cannot tell the anatomical difference between a chicken wing and a human femur, how can he be an
    expert on the more complex subject of extinction?  


    2.0   The Admixture Theory

    Perhaps the most amusing extinction theory to come out of Academia in the last 100 years is the
    'admixture' theory of how our most recent cousin disappeared. Admixture proposes that Neanderthal and
    Cro-Magnon 'did it,' meaning that you have Neanderthal blood running through you as we speak. The
    leading proponent of this theory is Trinkaus. He has written extensively and defended the argument that it
    is a mistake to regard the Neanderthals as a separate species. He is convinced that one of his great
    granddaddies back in the year 30,000 B.C. or so was a prominent Neanderthal. [1]  [2]  [3] Trinkaus
    believes he found evidence for his family lineage in a disfigured child (known as the Velho child) found in
    a cave in Portugal. According to Trinkaus, this child is a half-breed, a hybrid of a Neanderthal and a Cro-
    Magnon, a distant cousin or uncle of his. Trinkaus is not alone in his belief. Other so-called experts in their
    respective fields, Wolpoff [4] , Harding [5], Lahn [6] [7] believe that it is possible that they have Neanderthal
    blood running through them too, each for different reasons.

    You wonder what happened to science. We developed mtDNA sequencing techniques to resolve these
    types of disputes objectively. At least four separate analyses of Neanderthal mtDNA conclusively show
    that Neanderthal has nothing to do with us. [8]  [9]  [10]  [11]  Another study shows that human and
    Neanderthal DNA diverged no later than 400,000 years ago. [12] As a minimum, these results show little
    evidence in support of interbreeding. Yet the 'experts' spend their time inventing ever more loopholes to
    outflank the adverse results of these costly investigations. The worldly wisdom among those who
    continue to believe that they descend from Neanderthals is that the variation we see in these studies was
    to be expected after 25,000 years. Nothing you say or do, not a single morsel of evidence or crumb of
    proof is ever going to make them change their religion. Of course, you can bet that if mtDNA sequencing
    were to confirm that Neanderthal blended with Man, they will instantly turn around and praise the
    wonders of the technique.

    I think that these opinions say more about authority in the world of science than they do about
    Neanderthal's relation to us. I don't know how anyone can call Trinkaus an expert if he can't tell the
    difference between a Neanderthal bone and that of a human. Note that I am not saying that I can. I am
    saying that he can't, which means that he is no more an expert than me. Trinkaus has as much authority
    to talk about Neanderthal bones and even less about extinction as the bum on the street. All he can give
    you is his personal opinion which, judging strictly on its merits, is evidently worth squat!


    2.0   The new kid in town

    Trinkaus is absolutely baffled by extinction. Since he has no idea how Neanderthal disappeared and has
    trouble accepting conquest and competition displacement theories, he has no choice but to insist on
    marriage. Otherwise everything he learned in college is wrong and his entire life's work was in vain. There
    were no asteroids or comets colliding with the Earth 35,000 years ago, [13] no devastating supernovas
    that wiped out the oxygen from the atmosphere, [14] and no gushing volcanoes spewing lava and gases
    for thousands of years. [15] There was no impact winter that wiped out plants and indirectly left
    Neanderthal to starve and, had there been one, Trinkaus would be unable to explain how it selectively
    targeted Neanderthal anyways. If we now eliminate disease from the list, as far as he is concerned, we are
    left with a single agent: a new king of the mountain.

    According to Bakker, this is not unusual.  Something similar occurred in the Triassic when the croc-like
    Archosaurs overthrew the Cynodont regime in a violent revolution. (Ch. 20)  [16] Apparently, the
    Cynodonts had fallen into a false sense of security and, meanwhile, Cope's Law was furtively at work on a
    parallel species.

    Now who do you think could have come into the picture and erased Neanderthal?

    Well, one possibility is an invasion of little green men from Mars. Certainly, with sophisticated weaponry,
    the Martians would have first pulverized Neanderthal and then proceeded to build the pyramids and make
    crop circles. For some unknown reason few researchers find this version of events attractive, perhaps
    because the Martians would have done away with Cro-Magnon as well.

    Thus, having eliminated extraterrestrial meddling, that leaves only us. The overwhelming majority of
    anthropologists pin the blame for Neanderthal's disappearance on Man. In their view, it was our mean
    ancestors who had something to do with the extinction of this noble species! What else could have gotten
    rid of such a formidable hunter as Neanderthal?


    34.0   Man: lover or predator?

    But how did Man do it?

    Well, there are not that many choices here either. If we eliminate germs, we either made love with or war
    against the Neanderthals. That's it! There's very little else.

    Trinkaus must be a pacifist. He opted for love, and that was very 'human' of him. He suggests that just
    before Neanderthal disappeared completely, one lad proposed marriage to a human lassie. The girl is so
    flattered that she accepts, perhaps just to experience what it's like to be in bed with a savage. Both of  
    them later boast to their friends about how good it was and it becomes the rage. Soon Cromagnon gals
    are flocking to the kraals and joining the clans. This stirs raging jealousy in the spiteful Neanderthal
    women, who swear to even the score with their unfaithful men. They trim their brontosaur skirts and   
    begin flirting with the Cro-Magnon lads, who also want revenge against their loose women and thus allow
    themselves to be wooed. Tensions are high throughout Europe, and to release them, here and there the
    guys and gals have a little innocent fun and call them Croderthals and Neanmagnons. Well, the rest is
    prehistory. To make a long story short, in time, both sides grow older and wiser, settle their differences,
    and reach a consensus on school integration. Little Croderthals and Neanmagnons end up traveling by
    bus together, and peace once again reigns in the land. One of these kids was Trinkaus's great grand-
    daddy.

    In order for Trinkaus's proposal to remotely justify why the Neanderthal are not around today, we must
    accept that the two species married en masse over a period of 10,000 years or more. That's a lot of loving,
    just a little too much for even some of his colleagues to swallow:

    " we estimate that maximum interbreeding rates between the two populations should
       have been smaller than 0.1%. We indeed show that the absence of Neanderthal
       mtDNA sequences in Europe is compatible with at most 120 admixture events
       between the two populations despite a likely cohabitation time of more than 12,000 y.
       This extremely low number strongly suggests an almost complete sterility between
       Neanderthal females and modern human males"  [17]

    If Trinkaus has his way, around 40,000 years ago thousands upon thousands of Cro-Magnon began an
    invasion of Europe and mingled like hippies with the Neanderthals. They sat around like pilgrims and
    Wampanoag, smoked the peace pipe, and shared their turkey and pumpkin pies and prayed (Fig. 1). We
    are not talking about a one night stand in the bush. We are talking about the gradual disappearance of
    thousands of individuals of a species. Again, this says more about authority and expertise than what it
    says about the Neanderthals. The experts have run out of ideas and are now simply in the process of
    interpreting every bit of evidence as supportive of their theories.
M. Wolpoff, B. Mannheim, A. Mann, J. Hawks, R. Caspari, K. Rosenberg, D. Frayer, G. Gill, G. Clark
Why not the Neandertals? World Archaeology 36, 4 (Dec. 2004) pp. 527-546.

Fig. 1   The First Thanksgiving (40,000 B.C.)

    4.0   Hybrids are sterile

    Tattersall questions Trinkaus’s 'granddaddy' conclusions on grounds that the two species had
    significant morphological differences. [18]  (Diamond reinforces the argument against admixture with
    similar objections. [19] ) Tattersall argues that we have no way of knowing which features the offspring
    of these two species would inherit after a few thousand years of continuous inbreeding. Nevertheless,
    some of the features Trinkaus and Duarte and others use to justify their theory are within the range of
    human physical variation, rendering their sweeping conclusions dubious at best.

    A stronger argument that Tattersall puts forth is that two distinct species separated by time as
    Neanderthal and Man are likely to produce sterile offspring. [20] Tattersall has a point. Certainly, mules,
    tigons, and ligers have trouble propagating their hybrid species, and they are perhaps among the most
    susceptible species to be blended. Horses and asses diverged 1 million years ago and breed mules.
    Lions and tigers diverged 2 millon years ago and breed tigons and ligers. The problem is that mules,
    tigons, and ligers are sterile. If Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal took different roads 400,000 to 600,000
    years ago, it is unlikely that they could have bred viable offspring.

    In his defense, Trinkaus may argue that horses and donkeys on the one hand, and tigers and lions on
    the other are still capable of interbreeding despite their lengthy isolation. If Neanderthal and modern
    humans were separated by only 500,000 years, they could conceivably produce viable descendants
    when they met again.

    This argument is difficult to accept, mainly because the 'love' proposal has a more difficult problem to
    overcome than just sterility. It is hard to believe that there were compelling reasons for Neanderthal and
    Cro-Magnon to 'do it' in the bush. What happened? Was there a shortage of Neanderthal women? What
    reason would compel a massive crossover? You will never see horses and donkeys or tigers and lions
    mating in the wild:

    " In the wild, hybridization is almost non existent. Even in areas where similar species
       overlap, hybridization does not occur because animals are generally only stimulated
       by sexual cues from their own species. However, in captivity, animals can usually be
       easily hybridized with other species, because they are not in a wild state." [21]

    For example, American and European bison breed fertile offspring. [22] However, they do so in captivity
    and not in the wild. Here we have the two top predators of the day. Would they have put their
    differences aside and become family? My guess is that they would have made love in the wild as much
    as tigers and lions do today. Clans viewed other clans with suspicion, not to mention what they would
    have thought of an alien species muscling in on their territory. Perhaps Trinkaus and Duarte can’t tell
    thedifference between a woman and a chimp, but surely Neanderthal and Cromagnon would have
    recognized the other as a competitor and enemy. Before a conquistador slept with an Aztec squaw, he
    absolutely had to subdue the warrior.

    Nevertheless, think of the big picture and the logistics involved. The tigers of India invade the Serengeti
    and muscle in on lion territory. The tigers compete for the same zebras and gazelles, but the lions are
    not upset. Instead, the hosts welcome their long-lost cousins with open arms and share their road kills
    and brides. A few generations later we have tigers, ligers, and tigons, but no sign of the lions. Analysis
    of mtDNA and DNA confirms that the king of beasts is not in the blood. Sounds like a plan?
I think I have just the right guy
for you, sweetie...
MY HUSBAND!
He can be a bit of a Neanderthal
sometimes! Oh, you'll just love
him! He's an animal in bed! You
know what that hairy beast did
on our honeymoon?
Thank you ma’am. I’ll have
some of those, if you don’t
mind. By the way… What
are you doing tonight?
I think that they will make fine husbands for our girls!
The future generations will thank us for the decision
we took today to interbreed with this sturdy species.  

    And there is yet a more fundamental conceptual problem with what Trinkaus is proposing. If he is right,
    we can extend his reasoning to epochs and solve all extinctions, including the extinction of the
    dinosaurs. Under his proposal, the Heidelbergs blended with the Neanderthals a few hundred thousand
    years earlier, in which case he is a direct ancestor from these hybdrids too. Mammoths and mastodons
    disappeared by blending with elephants, and Allosaurus disappeared by blending with T-Rex? And we
    can carry his reasoning all the way to the Cambrian. If Trinkaus has his way, there was never an extinction
    in the entire history of life. Every species simply mated with the next one on the chronological charts and
    that's why we don't see them around any more.

    The so called experts have very little imagination and spend even less time thinking than they do writing.
    They are lazy, and rather than brainstorm new ideas, they keep fiddling with old ones in a hopeless
    attempt to convince their colleagues.


    5.0   Conclusions

    Whoever falls back on interaction with humans has a handful of choices to explain what happened. We
    either killed the Neanderthals by transmitting an unknown disease, exterminated them with our powerful
    weapons, crowded him out because of our superior hunting techniques, or intermarried with them. There
    are not that many more. The anthropologists cannot think beyond modern humans being responsible in
    some way for the disappearance of our cousin. Trinkaus chose love, but mtDNA analysis, sterility, and
    social factors make a mockery of his proposal. He should concede that he has no idea what caused the
    extinction of Neanderthal and be done with it.

    The strategic problem with Trnkaus's 'admixture' theory as well as with others proposed today is that
    they invoke extrinsic agents or mechanisms: diseases, predators, interspecies marriage, catastrophes,
    climate, etc. Only an intrinsic agent or mechanism can be used as a cookie cutter across all species
    irrespective of habitat, epoch, or external influence. Only an intrinsic agent or mechanism explains
    selectivity.

So what do you say, Leo? Let's bury the hatchet.
You let me sleep with Leona tonight, and I'll split with
you the gazelle I caught this morning in your territory!

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