New dates for disappearance of Neanderthals from Iberian Peninsula

New research suggests that Neanderthals disappeared from the Iberian Peninsula 45,000 years ago, 5,000 years earlier than they did from the rest of Europe.

Analysis with high resolution techniques, which combined palaeoenvironmental and archaeological data, point to “a progressive weakening of the population, or rather, not towards an abrupt end, but a gradual one, which must have been drawn out over several millennia, during which the human groups dwindled in number,” as Cristo Hernández, another of the study’s authors and researcher at ULL, told SINC.

This gradual disappearance coincided with a change in the climate creating colder and more arid environmental conditions, “which must have had an effect on the lives of these diminishing populations,” adds Hernández. The anatomically modern humans had no role in this disappearance, unlike “the significant worsening of the climate, given that their presence in these lands was much later,” reveals the researcher.

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Story: SINC | Photo: Human Evolution Museum (MEH). Junta de Castilla y León