In his latest book, the paleoanthropologist Ludovic Slimak recounts how, as a young man, he spent his time observing people as he played the bagpipes in a kilt on the dirty streets of Marseille. Driven by an unconscious impulse, he had decided to master the instrument, and he succeeded, even leading a famous band in France. Then his first child was born, he found himself traveling from gig to gig, and eventually, he gave it up. But he was able to earn his PhD with the money he made from music.
The French scientist has been able to spend the last 30 years observing and studying one of the most decisive moments in the history of evolution: the encounter between our species and the Neanderthals, our closest human relatives. One of his latest discoveries is Thorin, a Neanderthal who lived around 42,000 years ago, very close to the moment of extinction. From then on, Homo sapiens became the only human species on the planet.
In his new book The Last Neanderthal: Understanding How Humans Die, Slimak, 52, reflects on the reasons for the disappearance of these human cousins, and what it reveals about ourselves. “It’s a sad book,” he underscores, because despite the latest evidence that Neanderthals controlled fire, created cave art, and had sex and children with our own species — leaving a trace of their DNA in our genome — this scientist from the French National Center for Scientific Research believes they went extinct in isolation and abandonment. Slimak answers EL PAÍS’ questions via videoconference from his beautiful home, where he lives with his wife and two children, halfway between Toulouse and the Pyrenees.
There’s a profound set of topics being raised here, and one needs to read the full article to absorb the real arguments he’s making for the headline.
The common thread here seems to be that in the significant presence of sapiens, some species: 1) lose enough critical territory and 2) are unable to live amongst sapiens such that… they die out. They’re simply not able to survive past those two constraints. Not so different perhaps from some species refusal to breed in human captivity.
Species can also become super-adapted to a set of specific conditions such that they’re not able to survive a critical set of environmental changes. Conditions that descend too quickly for them to adapt to, for example in most dinosaurs not being able to survive the new conditions created in the wake of the meteor strike in the now Gulf of Mexico.
Questions might be here: if sapiens didn’t exist, would neanderthals have existed past their historical extinction point? What about the five other human species that existed 50Kyrs ago? Flores for example were isolated from the other humans AFAIK.
To me, it seems quite possible here that it wasn’t so much neanderthalensis losing the will to live, but like countless other species, moreso that they were unable to continue in the changing world created by modern man.
Humans disappear when they no longer want to live because their values have collapsed’
Well that’s pretty relatable.
