lived in Europe for at least a hundred thousand years. For the most part,
this was a time of cold, and for stretches, it was intensely cold, with ice
sheets covering Scandinavia. It is believed, though it’s not known for
certain, that, to protect themselves, the Neanderthals built shelters and
fashioned some sort of clothing. Then, roughly thirty thousand years ago,
the Neanderthals vanished.
All sorts of theories have been offered up to explain the vanishing.
Often climate change is invoked, sometimes in the form of general
instability leading up to what’s referred to in earth science circles as the
Last Glacial Maximum, and sometimes in the form of a “volcanic winter”
that’s believed to have been caused by an immense eruption not far from
Ischia, in the area known as the Phlegraean Fields. Disease is also
sometimes blamed, and so, too, is simple bad luck. In recent decades,
though, it’s become increasingly clear that the Neanderthal went the way
of the Megatherium, the American mastodon, and the many other
unfortunate megafauna. In other words, as one researcher put it to me,
“their bad luck was us.”
Modern humans arrived in Europe around forty thousand years ago,
and again and again, the archaeological record shows, as soon as they