Migration of modern humans may have doomed Neanderthals, says study

What killed off the Neanderthals? It’s a big debate, and now a study said that no matter what the answer, they were doomed anyway.

Our close evolutionary cousins enjoyed a long run in Europe and Asia, but they disappeared about 40,000 years ago after modern humans showed up from Africa.

The search for an explanation has produced many theories including climate change, epidemics, or inability to compete with the modern humans, who may have had some mental or cultural edge.

The new study isn’t intended to argue against those factors, but just to show that they’re not needed to explain the extinction, says Oren Kolodny of Stanford University.

He and colleague Marcus Feldman present their approach in a paper released on Tuesday by the journal Nature Communications.

They based their conclusion on a computer simulation that represented small bands of Neanderthals and modern humans in Europe and Asia. These local populations were randomly chosen to go extinct, and then be replaced by another randomly chosen population, with no regard for whether it represented the same species.