Evolutionists
and Creationists can come up with widely disparate theories
as
to why the Neanderthals, who “appeared to have everything going for them”, suddenly,
startlingly, disappeared from the world scene.
Anne Habermehl, who lists some of
these many theories, considers that Dr. Jack Cuozzo’s “explanation of the Neanderthal demise [is] a good one”:
Those Enigmatic
Neanderthals. What Are They Saying?
Are We Listening?
Why Did the Neanderthals Disappear?
The biggest puzzle, that
neither the majority of creationists nor the evolutionists have been able to
solve, is why the Neanderthals disappeared. The robust Neanderthals appeared to
have everything going for them, all agree, and there is no visible reason why
they should not have survived (Trinkaus 1978). Nonetheless, disappear they did,
rather suddenly, before the end of the post-Flood Ice Age or, as evolutionists
call it, the end of the last ice age9 (Van Andel and Davies 2004).
Everyone agrees that
modern humans showed up on the world scene at approximately the same time that
the Neanderthals disappeared; whether or not this timing was a coincidence is
debated. Some evolutionists allow thousands of years for the two groups to
overlap—how many thousand is a matter of intense discussion—because they have a
lot of time at their disposal, and a few thousand years here or there are a
mere trifle (see, for example, Lewin 1999, pp. 157, 165–166). Creationists
obviously have far less historical time available to account for the
Neanderthal disappearance and subsequent appearance of modern man; therefore
they have to explain how this mysterious event could have happened so quickly.
But the problem for both sides is the same: why did it happen?
The proposed explanations
forwarded by evolutionists on the Neanderthal demise have been both varied and
creative, and only a sampling of the rather large literature on this subject
can be touched on here. The Neanderthals’ supposed inability to cope with
climate change has been especially popular (Jimenez-Espejo et al. 2007);
although the Neanderthals had been able to live through the Ice Age successfully,
they apparently could not cope with the ending of this cold period. Also much
discussed are losing out to modern humans in various kinds of competition
(Banks et al. 2008; Hoffecker 2002; Shea 2001), intermarrying with moderns
(Zilhão 2006), or possibly both (Miller 2001). But there are others. Carnieri
(2006) suggests that anatomically modern humans in Europe ate a lot of seafood;
this more healthful diet helped them outlive the largely carnivorous
Neanderthals. Sorensen (n.d.) suggests that Homo sapiens, migrating out
of Africa, brought infectious disease that killed off the Neanderthals. Kuhn
and Stiner (2006) argue that because Neanderthals did not divide their labor
between the sexes the way modern humans did, this gave the latter a survival
advantage. A mathematician, using what he calls a “simple mathematical
homogeneous model of competition,” has determined that extinction of the
Neanderthals was unavoidable (Flores 1998). Economists have gotten into the act
with a theory that the Neanderthals came out second best because modern humans
were better at trade (Horan, Bulte, and Shogren 2005). A rather grisly version
surfaced in reports that, finally, there was good evidence that the
Neanderthals actually did practice cannibalism, as had been suspected (Sanders
1999); presumably we were to believe that, like the gingham dog and the calico
cat (Field 1894), the Neanderthals simply ate each other up. Then a different
angle on the alleged cannibalism was proposed: eating each other, especially
the brains, might have caused spreading of a mad-cow-related disease that could
have played a large part in wiping the Neanderthals out (Underdown 2008). More
recently, news articles (for example, McKie 2009) trumpeted to the world that
it was actually cannibalistic modern humans who ate the Neanderthals up; this
was based on an interview with scientist Fernando Rozzi, head of a research
team that had just published a paper (Rozzi et al. 2009) that cast doubt on
what their leader was telling the press(!). According to a group of
geneticists, the small population size of Neanderthals may have made them more
vulnerable to extinction, whatever the causes (Briggs et al. 2009).
This is not an exhaustive
list of the many possibilities that have been proposed. As one insightful
science newswriter says, “Figuring out why Neanderthals died out and what they
were like when alive have kept plenty of scientists busy” (ANI 2009). Mark
Twain would have been quite impressed by how little hard evidence supports some
of these papers. He wrote, “There is something fascinating about science. One
gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of
fact” (Twain 1883). One might think he was talking about evolutionists’ papers
on the disappearance of the Neanderthals.
Meanwhile, creationists’
explanations of the Neanderthal demise have seemed rather tame and tentative by
comparison, nor has there been a noticeable rush to embrace many of the various
theories offered by evolutionists. Even Lubenow, who is very definite about
many other ideas in his book, glosses lightly over the matter of why
creationists think the Neanderthals disappeared from view; indeed, he
speculates that Neanderthals could have survived into fairly recent times
(Lubenow 2004, p. 82). The creationist stance is exemplified by a recent online
piece about an apparent Neanderthal stabbing (Human stabbed a Neanderthal,
evidence suggests, 2009), that ended with the words,
The more interesting debate is whether Neanderthals went
entirely extinct . . . or whether their genes survive in many modern Europeans,
as some studies have suggested.
On the one
side, Oard (2006a, p. 129) states that the Neanderthals “very likely”
intermarried with Cro-Magnon man, who seemed to follow the Neanderthals into
Europe some time later; and Sarfati (2004, p. 317) concludes that “. . . modern
humans and Neandertals likely amalgamated in Europe.” But, on the other side,
Wise (2008) claims that DNA evidence shows that we do not carry Neanderthal
genes today; therefore Neanderthals went extinct without intermarrying with
modern humans. He speculates that this extinction event could have occurred
because of challenges of survival in the post-Flood earth, or from various
kinds of human violence.
The creationist
debate as to whether or not the Neanderthals mixed their genes with those of
modern humans through marriage is mirrored by evolutionists (who prefer to talk
about “interbreeding” or “admixing” or “cohabiting”). Their positions are
entrenched on both sides of this fence. “It is becoming increasingly clear that
the Neanderthals and their modern human successors did not mix and that the
Neanderthals are an extinct side branch of humanity” (Klein 2003); see also
Currat and Excoffier (2004) and Tattersall (2007). But on the opposite side of
the question are Wolpoff et al. (2004), who specifically refute Klein (2003);
and Trinkhaus (2007), who believes that paleoanthropology shows definitively
that the Neanderthals and moderns interbred, and the case is closed. Not so,
says Paabo (Morgan 2009), whose belief in DNA and genome mapping (Green et al.
2008) bring him down on the side of almost total lack of interbreeding between
Neanderthals and later humans. There would appear to be practically no middle
ground between the two camps.
Predictably,
progressive (old-earth) creationist Hugh Ross much prefers the DNA “proof” that
Neanderthals and modern humans did not interbreed10; this is an extremely important
matter to Ross, because if it can be shown that they did intermix, this would
be “fatal to the current Progressive Creationist model,” according to Line
(2007).
Obviously
creationists and evolutionists are grappling with the same questions. Lubenow’s
remark that the disappearance of the Neanderthals is like the disappearance of
the Cheshire cat (Carroll 1865), whose grin remains to taunt evolutionists
(Lubenow 2004, p. 81), applies equally to creationists. Clearly, the matter of
what caused the disappearance of the Neanderthals has not been clear at all.
A major problem
with most of the proffered hypotheses on the Neanderthal extinction is the
widening geographical distribution of Neanderthal sites that have been located
in the past few years, a subject that will be discussed later in this paper.
Many authors address extinction of the Neanderthals in Europe, for example, and
then rather ignore the ones in more far-flung places. Did other Neanderthals in
other places become extinct for the same reasons? The whole subject becomes
more complicated as the very large distances involved make it increasingly
difficult to assume that everything can be explained by merely saying that the
Neanderthals were nomadic.
However, the
problem of the demise of the Neanderthals goes away entirely if we accept that
Cuozzo is correct in his conclusions that the Neanderthals were the post-Flood
long-lived people who spread out from Babel in all directions. Their
“disappearance” would have occurred when they no longer lived long enough to
develop the distinctive Neanderthal characteristics.11 The modern humans who supposedly
“replaced” the Neanderthals would be the descendants of the latter, who did not
live as long as their ancestors. This not only makes the matter of the
Neanderthal disappearance very simple and straightforward, it also explains why
it happens that modern humans arose at around the same time as the Neanderthals
disappeared; furthermore, this would be true in all parts of the world.
Proponents of Occam’s razor (Occam’s razor 2009), often stated as “The simplest
explanation is usually the best,” would recognize the Cuozzo explanation of the
Neanderthal demise as a good one.
According to
Cuozzo, we would expect that, with people’s decreasing lifespans as time went
on, the Neanderthal characteristics would gradually lessen from generation to
generation, and then disappear entirely. In fact, this is what we see in
various archaeological discoveries, although these are usually interpreted as
humans that are the result of intermarriage between the Neanderthal and modern
peoples (except for the DNA proponents, who do not agree, and who propose other
ideas). For example, excavations in Israel are claimed to show “continuous
biological evolution from Neanderthal to
anatomically modern Homo sapiens” (Jelinek 1982). Also, at the
Neanderthal site in Romania, the human remains display a “mosaic of modern
human and archaic and/or Neandertal features” according to the paper published
on the find (Soficaru, Dobos, and Trinkaus 2006). Creationists have hailed this
as exciting news and further evidence that the Neanderthals were fully human
beings (Anderson 2006; Jaroncyk 2007).
It follows
logically that Cuozzo’s work knocks out the underpinnings of the Ross old-earth
belief system, since the Ross view of Neanderthals as animals without spirits
is nullified.