The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived

by Clive Finlayson

Just 28,000 years ago, the blink of an eye in geological time, the last of Neanderthals died out in their last outpost, in caves near Gibraltar. Thanks to cartoons and folk accounts we have a distorted view of these other humans - for that is what they were. We think of them as crude and
clumsy and not very bright, easily driven to extinction by the lithe, smart modern humans that came out of Africa some 100,000 years ago.

But was it really as simple as that? Clive Finlayson reminds us that the Neanderthals were another kind of human, and their culture was not so very different from that of our own ancestors. In this book, he presents a wider view of the events that led to the migration of the moderns into Europe,
what might have happened during the contact of the two populations, and what finally drove the Neanderthals to extinction. It is a view that considers climate, ecology, and migrations of populations, as well as culture and interaction.

His conclusion is that the destiny of the Neanderthals and the Moderns was sealed by ecological factors and contingencies. It was a matter of luck that we survived and spread while the Neanderthals dwindled and perished. Had the climate not changed in our favour some 50 million years ago, things
would have been very different.

There is much current research interest in Neanderthals, much of it driven by attempts to map some of their DNA. But it's not just a question of studying the DNA. The rise and fall of populations is profoundly moulded by the larger scale forces of climate and ecology. And it is only by taking this
wider view that we can fully understand the course of events that led to our survival and their demise. The fact that Neanderthals survived until virtually yesterday makes our relationship with them and their tragedy even more poignant. They almost made it, after all.

Genres: Science, History, Nonfiction, Anthropology, Evolution, Biology, Prehistory

288 pages, Hardcover

First published September 24, 2009

Reviews

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Homo sapiens neanderthalensis may be the title character, but his role is relatively supportive to Finlayson’s descriptively detailed narrative of human evolution. And it’s not so much ‘how’ humans evolved as it is ‘where’ they evolved, ‘when’ they evolved, and ‘why’ all that matters.

Let us forget the rather grandiose conceptualizations of our ancestral Out-Of-Africa exodus. We are an invasive rather than a migratory species. Finlayson frequently uses the Eurasian collared dove, another invasive species, as an analogy:

“…the collared doves settled in suitable areas in south-eastern Europe… Their offspring could not stay where the parents lived, so they moved a kilometer or two down the road to the next park. Like this, kilometer by kilometer, the birds got across Europe… There was no migration of collared doves; it was simply a demographically triggered geographical expansion.”

From there it is a somewhat awkward and slightly problematic leap to:

“…there was nothing particularly special about human geographical expansion in prehistory, and it most certainly was not a migration of peoples.”

Kudos to the author for equating hominid expansion to something as visually aesthetic as the collared dove. Personally, I would have opted for something less adorable like Australia’s cane toad or the brown tree snakes of Guam.

As it turns out, Finlayson is full of interesting and thought provoking ideas. Take for instance his theory on bipedalism:

“Orangutans share something with humans that gorillas and chimpanzees do not. All of them can stand upright but when chimpanzees and gorillas do so, the hind limbs are flexed. Orangutans and humans, on the other hand, stand on straight hind limbs. This way of walking on tree branches gives the orangutan great benefits.”

From there it is a somewhat awkward and slightly problematic leap to:

“…the old idea that walking on two feet started when our ancestors ventured away from the forest into the open savannahs no longer holds. It now looks likely that bipedal walking may have started on the trees themselves.”

It’s not that the author’s ideas are without merit. Quite the opposite. His theories are exceptional and plausible and intriguing. It is his leap-of-faith logic of progression that saps away some of his credence.

Where were we? Oh yes, I remember - the plight of the Neanderthals:

[SPOILER ALERT] It turns out that Finlayson’s hypothesis on the extinction of the Neanderthals is perhaps the least controversial thing in his book. He attributes their disappearance to a combination of factors, the least of which is the encroachment of modern humans. In his analysis, what little interbreeding there was between Neanderthals and so-called ‘modern humans’ was incidental and inconsequential. It was climate change, their calorie-dependent physical build, their proclivity for ambush hunting and ambush hunting technology, and an unhealthy dose of sheer bad luck that did them in. From what paleoanthropologists can discern from the fossil record, Neanderthal populations were declining before Homo sapiens appeared on the scene. Their demise might have been accelerated by the competition and encroachment, but their fate was already sealed.

“Irrespective of the position that we might take regarding the causes of the extinction of the Neanderthals, it is undeniable that by the time the Ancestors reached their strongholds in southern Europe and Asia these ancient peoples of Eurasia were already on the way out.”

Let me end with a quote from the last chapter of The Humans Who Went Extinct. It reads as Finlayson venting a little steam and is probably my favorite passage in the whole book:

“[The Agricultural Revolution] marked the start of the illusion of progress towards a world of unsustainable growth, a dream that has turned into a nightmare as we procrastinate today while the current state and the future of our planet hang in the balance as a result of our voracity. How could we have reached such an unhealthy state of affairs? The answer lies in the way in which we got to the present, not as evolutionary superstars but as pests that invaded every nook and cranny that became available.”

3.5 stars, rounded up

[Captain Sir Roddy, R.N. (Ret.) · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a terrific book, and one that I highly recommend. Let me see if I can do the book any justice with my efforts at producing a meaningful review. I work with endangered species and degraded riparian ecosystems along a large river system in the American Southwest, and I very much appreciated Clive Finlayson's incorporation of the environmental and ecological aspects associated with the story of human origins. In Finlayson's The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived he takes great care to deftly weave together the latest information about paleoclimate conditions, the paleoecologies, paleoenvironments of the regions that were occupied by our hominin ancestors. Broadly speaking, Finlayson's tale is an "Out-of-Africa" story, and that is as it should be in my humble opinion. The Out-of-Africa model associated with modern human origins really does seem to make the most sense when compared to the existing fossil, archaeological, environmental, biological, and genetic evidence and data that is so aptly described by Finlayson in this fascinating account.

The important take-away for me upon finishing this excellent book was two-fold. First, we--modern humans--are incredibly lucky to even be here today. Little differences here or there over the past 75,000 years and it is very likely that Homo sapiens would be just as extinct as other human species, like the Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis). Second, climate-change was the big game-changer over the five or six million years of human evolution, and it was the ability to rapidly react to these swings in climate and ecological conditions that made it possible for some human populations to ultimately succeed while many others did not. This is a lesson that we need to pay careful attention to now. Just because humans occupy the planet now really is no guarantee that we will still be here twenty millenia from now.

There's a lot of information in this book, and much of it is quite thought-provoking. I can honestly say that I am just a little bit sad too, that our incredibly long-lived close cousins--the Neanderthal peoples--are extinct. Somehow I think the planet is just a little bit lonelier without those people who lived here for hundreds of thousands of years in great harmony with their environment. It seems simply amazing to imagine that there was a fairly long period of time where Neanderthal peoples and modern humans actually occupied the same regions and probably even competed for the same resources in the day-to-day struggle to survive. This is a great and grand story, and in my continuing quest to more fully understand my own human origins I am so glad to have encountered and read Finlayson's superb book, and to now have it on my shelf to go back to periodically.

[Nate · Rating 2 out of 5]

the cover and title of this book are misleading. If you are looking for a book about Neanderthals this isn't really it; there are really only a couple of chapters specifically about them. mostly he gets up on a soap box about how anthropologists have it all wrong and draw quick conclusions from very little actual data.
He feels(based on suspiciously little data) that instead of neandetthal ancestors coming from africa 300,000 yrars ago and our ancestors coming from africa 50,000 years ago that there were different migrations and small pockets of dead-end evolutionare experiments all over europe. He also feels that instead of our ancestors wiping out neanderthals because of superior ability, it was pure luck that we lived and not them. the thrust of his arguement was that neanderthals were stalking hunters that would hunt one animal at a time and need no help from a large community. light projectile weapons were useless to them because of all the trees where they lived.
On the flip side our ancestors adapted to the open steppe (huge grassy plains that covered europe) and hunted in packs like wolves. they needed projectiles and large communities to survive. so as the ice age made the woods smaller and the steppe bigger, neanderthals were pushed out. if it would have warmed instead it may have been us being studied by them today. only because of random chance. he ends on a cynical note saying that eventually our kind will die out too and something else will take our place.

[Terence · Rating 4 out of 5]

I hate the cover of The Humans Who Went Extinct (THWWE). There’s an image of the savannah at sunset and superimposed in the right-hand corner is the face of a waifish Neanderthal child. Very adorable. But every time I look at it, I have visions of thuggish Cro-Magnons smashing through a sleepy Neanderthal camp bashing in this kid’s head and tossing her infant siblings up in the air to catch them on their spears.

That aside, THWWE is a fascinating interpretation of the hominid family bush, our place on it, and the places of our cousins. Finlayson doesn’t advocate a radically new perspective but he does want to reassess how much we can know based on the available genetic, fossil and archaeological evidence, and argue that we still have a long road ahead before coming to a definitive narrative (if ever).

Over the last couple of months I’ve read two other works that bear on this topic – The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind and The 10 000 Year Explosion How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution – and it’s instructive to see the different interpretations reached by these four authors. Where Jaynes saw human consciousness arising very late – within the last 3,000 years – Finlayson is of that school (of which I’m an auditing student, as well) which argues that “consciousness” to some degree is an outgrowth of a suitably complex brain. He ascribes it to earlier hominids, australopithecines, and primates in general, as well as cetaceans, octopi, elephants – basically all the higher order animals – as well as modern humans. The author argues that modern human success is the result of favorable climate and cultural factors with little contribution from biology – at least no significant contribution in the last 150,000 to 200,000 years. Which places him in clear opposition to both Jaynes and Cochran and Harpending, the latter of whom see genetic mutations as the basis for nearly every development in hominid history. Finlayson’s viewpoint isn’t completely unbalanced: We’re descended from a line of primates better adapted to the climatic conditions that prevailed over a large portion of the Eurasian-African super-continent at a particular point in history that allowed them to spread out over a wide range. But the final advantages that catapulted modern H. sapiens over Neanderthals and others were climatic and cultural.

A constant theme throughout the book is that modern humans are the product of chance. At any point in the story, a different climate, a more disease-resistant population, or any other variable could have favored a cousin species and would have produced a far different world then the one we live in today.

So what were these initial lucky breaks that has brought us to where we currently stand?

1. In general, primates have flexible joints. It made brachiating (tree climbing) easier and allowed some of them to come down to the ground and walk upright.

2. When the tropical forests that were our primatial cradle began to retreat and fragment due to climate change, our primate ancestors who lived on the margins of the range were able to adapt to a bipedal stance, among other things.

This concept of living on the margins is another important idea in Finlayson’s argument. In essence, when a species finds itself in crisis, it’s the populations on the margins of its range that do best – if they’re able to adapt at all. Time and again, our progenitors were caught at the edges and forced to adapt. As mentioned, Finlayson sees less and less direct evolutionary pressure as time goes on in this change and a greater role for culture. But the defining factor is always climate: Absent the catalyst of environmental change, there’s vanishingly little pressure for either biological or cultural change.

One more point about margins: They’re regions of ecological diversity and the species living there are adapted to exploiting a wider variety of resources to survive. This flexibility makes them “innovators” as compared to the “conservatives” – those stodgy, stay at homes who populate the heartlands of a range.

3. Among the “other things” mentioned above was an omnivorous diet. Fruits, nuts and the occasional insect may have been on the original menu but hominid digestive tracts can handle a wide variety of cuisines. Critical for our ancestors who found themselves very far from the tropical Kansas of our origins.

The first widespread expansion of the Homo genus came with H. erectus - venerable icon of paleoarchaeology textbooks and probably one of our direct ancestors. Finlayson is at pains to point out that we don’t have enough evidence to reconstruct direct connections between hominid fossils. Any claims to the contrary are provisional and can be upset by the next find. (The evidence often consist of nothing more than a few bone fragments and some teeth. The prominence given to Lucy, the australopithecine girl, is due to the completeness of the skeleton, c. 40%, which tends to make it loom larger than it deserves. Though she’s clearly on the road to Homo, Lucy is not necessarily a direct ancestor to our version.)

But back to Erectus: By about 1 million years ago (1 mya), their populations stretched from China to the Atlantic and extended down the eastern side of Africa (there’s a nice map of this on p. 60 of my edition). Then disaster struck – the cycle of ice ages and interglacials kicked into gear and hominids experienced fragmentation, decimation, recovery, and then further fragmentations, decimations and recoveries (or not) in approx. 100,000-year cycles. One of these relict populations produced H. heidelbergensis, an offshoot of which further evolved into Neanderthals. Another fragment became the proto-H. sapiens who were our direct ancestors.

One of Finlayson’s more interesting interpretations of the evidence is that the Neanderthals were the last, moribund population of the Heidelberg line. The cyclical population collapses, the disappearance of the climate zones Neanderthal had evolved in, and the more flexible cultures of H. sapiens drove them into extinction. But that doesn’t mean that Neanderthals, or Heidelberg humans, were unsuccessful as a species. They survived for half a million years or more and kept modern humans out of Europe until about 45,000 years ago. Their nemesis, according to Finlayson, was Mother Nature. Had Europe retained the forests, climate and fauna in which Heidelberg was born, early humans would have been far less successful in penetrating Europe and prevented from doing so for far longer. This points up a weakness, I think, in Finlayson’s argument: The near absence of any consideration of biological evolution. He seems to be of the view that Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon were essentially the same mentally; purely cultural and climatic factors allowed the latter to prevail. If that’s the essential difference, why weren’t Neanderthal able to adopt Cro-Magnon methods? Perhaps Finlayson avoids the subject because we don’t have sufficient evidence yet to say anything useful about the subject. Genetic assays of the Neanderthal genome is an exciting new branch of science but still in its infancy, despite its impressive achievements to date. Finlayson is perhaps wise in remaining agnostic.

Most reconstructions of prehistoric humans put the Agricultural Revolution (c. 12,000 years ago) as the decisive moment in our evolution that solidified H. sapiens’ place as the dominant hominid. Finlayson argues that the real revolution took place 30,000 years earlier among a population of humans struggling to survive on the steppes between the Black and Caspian seas. Here, some tribe discovered how to store food and cooperate at large scales. In a word, they had discovered “surpluses” and how to manage them. This new way of life was so successful that it had transformed every culture throughout Eurasia within 20,000 years – from the edges of China straight across to the Atlantic and (most significantly) in the Middle East, where there turned out to be a wealth of exploitable plants and animals to support the looming farming age.

The epilog – “Children of Chance” – summarizes Finlayson’s views. In the course of 1.5 to 2 million years a succession of hominids were in the right places at the right time with the right adaptive abilities to exploit and survive climatic changes and displace older, less flexible populations. The author’s outlook for human life, as a species, is optimistic – hominids have a few more chapters to write – but, in the short term, he sees a period of disruption and displacement that will alter how H. sapiens lives in ways at least as fundamental as the discoveries of surpluses and farming. He believes the survivors of the coming crunch will be those living, as usual, on the margins. As he puts it, “Taming the future is the essence of the human story. Recall that the successful populations that ultimately led to us were always those living on the edge of others who monopolized the good-quality territory. We were born from the poor and feeble that had to spend every ounce of energy searching for the scraps that kept them alive. This may seem a little undignified for those of us who see ourselves at the pinnacle of evolution but that is the sobering reality of our story. Every step of the way in the unpredictable story that led us was marked by populations of innovators living on the periphery” (p. 214).

I have no illusions about where I live – I’m a product of the heartlands, that “good-quality territory” that’s rapidly becoming untenable. I can only hope that the real crunch holds off until I’m safely dead or near enough that it doesn’t matter :-)

More seriously, I highly recommend this book. It’s very well and clearly written, and it packs an amazing amount of information into its 220 pages. As a plus, the endnotes provide some useful guides to further reading.

[Iset · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe this book was just a mismatch between what I was actually looking for and the actual content, but I just never got on board with this one. The title, cover, and back cover blurb led me to believe that the subject matter would be about the Neanderthals, and on top of that I had been led to Clive Finlayson’s book through reading Alice Roberts’ popular history The Incredible Human Journey, in which Clive’s work on Neanderthal sites in Gibraltar features. However, when I got into it, the Neanderthals featured only in passing, whilst the main topic of discussion was climate change and palaeoenvironments, against which is set the much wider story of human evolution. This was not what I had been expecting exactly, but I gamely stuck with it. Unfortunately I encountered a few problems along the way.

Firstly the material is delivered in a pretty dry manner, and the book is chock full of details – I began to find it a struggle to keep my interest up, especially since I tend to find palaeoenvironments a rather dry topic at the best of times. The specific information covered and the style of delivery seemed like it was geared towards pre-existing subject specialists.

Secondly, for some reason inexplicable to me, Finlayson insisted upon referring to one particular group of humans as "the Ancestors" instead of more familiar terms. This confused me enormously and I was never clear on whether he was referring to anatomically modern Homo sapiens that lived in the Palaeolithic, some anatomically modern group but more robust in appearance as opposed to latter day gracile forms, or some pre-Homo sapiens species that may have been a direct antecedent, such as the theoretically African equivalents of Homo heidelbergensis. Finlayson put forwards some interesting environmental perspectives – such as the notion that Out of Africa is too simplistic a model and in fact Homo sapiens and prior Homo genuses had made the journey many times before simply as a response to moving with an expanding advantageous environmental band as certain climate conditions prevailed. I was most definitely piqued by the idea, but wondered where the evidence was for this.

Thirdly, I don’t know why but, like another reviewer, for some reason it was uncomfortable reading when Finlayson laid into colleagues. He seemed to be trying to make a point about how shoddy and unsupportable certain conclusions were on the basis of little evidence, but it kind of felt... superior. In fact, the whole book felt like it was labouring under the premise that the readership is possessed of a kind of latter day colonialist attitude about the superiority of Homo sapiens and has an impression of Neanderthals as little better than grunting apes, and as a result there’s a consistent ambiance of superiority of its own, of almost delight in attempting to knock down this assumed reader stance. Even the back cover blurb reads:

"On the front cover of this book is the reconstruction of a Neanderthal woman. Doesn’t she look human? Perhaps her strikingly human appearance comes as something of a shock. It erodes our assumptions of uniqueness."

Um... no, her appearance doesn’t come as a shock to me. The depiction of Neanderthal man as a knuckle-dragging troglodyte is decades out of date, and vastly inaccurate, as I know, and I imagine as would anyone else picking up a book on this topic – unless a complete layman happened to pick this up first time, but as I mentioned earlier, the specialist nature of this book and the depth of the material is really not geared towards a layman readership. And no, the appearance of the Neanderthal woman does not erode my sense of uniqueness. Neanderthals were a distinctly separate branch of the Homo genus, and even within Homo sapiens, we’re all different as individuals. One can have no assumptions of superiority but still recognise that each and every being is unique. I may have read this ambiance into the book, but that's just what it felt like. Finlayson stresses that the survival and success of Homo sapiens was down to chance, and as a strong believer in chance happenings and as an historian and archaeologist I have to agree that this has been the case many many times throughout history, but I would be cautious about asserting that it was entirely due to chance, as Finlayson appears to - surely the impetus for evolution itself is to exploit advantageous traits that would promote success of the species, or rather, to randomly mutate and then advantageous traits tend to survive for their usefulness.

By Chapter Three I was skimming, and when it didn’t get any better at holding my interest, I hurriedly skimmed to the end just to get through the thing. Some additional points; Finlayson suggests that the chronology was such that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens may never have encountered each other, or only, at most, for a couple of thousand years of overlap, and he also concludes from the evidence that interbreeding did not take place, or at least in such a small degree that it is not detectable – pity for Finlayson that less than two years after his book came out interbreeding has been proven by a genetic contribution of up to 4%. Finlayson argues that the lack of Neanderthal and Homo sapiens contact implies that Neanderthals were successfully keeping Homo sapiens out of Europe and that Homo sapiens could only move in when the Neanderthals began to go extinct due to climate change. Whilst I, like Finlayson, doubt the idea that Homo sapiens in conflict with Neanderthals were the (sole) cause of Neanderthal extinction, and the idea of climate change having an impact on the Neanderthals does sound plausible to me, I think, especially given recent discoveries, that the Neanderthals did not keep Homo sapiens out of Europe and that there was more contact than Finlayson suggests.

I’m not sure who I would recommend this book to. On the one hand it’s so dry and specialist in its concerns that it really feels like it’s aimed at existing specialists. Finlayson does come up with a some interesting points that are worth noticing, such as his ideas about the expansion of environment bands leading to a more complex course of events than simply multiple Out of Africas, and the point that changes in the environment likely were one of the contributing factors to the disappearance of the Neanderthals. But I felt that other ideas that he presents were ones I just couldn't credit, personally. Perhaps a specialist would be able to make more sense of it than I, but I do stand by my criticism that the book seems to assume its readers’ anti-Neanderthal bias when in fact my attitude going into the book was one of curiosity and fascination with Neanderthals.

5 out of 10.

[Nicky · Rating 3 out of 5]

Basically a book that criticises making concrete judgements on the little data we have available, and then makes some of his own, which is kind of how a lot of this works, so no surprise there. On the technical side, I found his style off-putting: it seems to suggest an intentionality and directionality to evolution that does not exist.

Overall, the basic thesis is interesting: that climate and chance drove human evolution, and determined which branches of the evolutionary tree survived. That's accepted when it comes to other animals, but in humans we do tend to make arguments about Neanderthals being stupider than humans, etc. And yet, put me in the environment the Neanderthals thrived in, and I'd have a lot of trouble, too -- and here I am with bits of paper I can show you to prove my intelligence by our standards.

I did find some things funny, like Finlayson's self-righteous little comment about people in their comfort zones pretending to care about people in less fortunate conditions and doing nothing. He's writing for Oxford University Press -- that glass house he's sitting in is very conspicuous.

(Probably this irritation is somewhat prompted by the fact that I am one of those people in my comfort zone. On the other hand, I tithe a portion of my income to various charities, and give up significant chunks of my free time to charity work. I don't think Finlayson's research does as much good for the human condition, in the grand scheme of things. For all I know he donates all the proceeds of this book to charity, but still, he also flies all over the world doing his research and spends his time writing books like this. There's a place for that, but you'd probably best not be making disparaging comments about your likely readers while you're sat in that place.)

[Nurshafira Noh]

One of interesting read, though I must say, I couldn't really rate this book due my lack of in-depth exposure in this topic. Yet, Finlayson had helped me to identify several questions that are missing (or intentionally left out) from the book, on the idea of first human on Earth.

1) On what is human, in the first place? On what we will base that idea of a man - through the tools they produced, or the paintings on the cave walls, or the labor of hunting animals for food? Through out the book, Finlayson had admitted at least in two places that archaeology could not answer certain questions.

2) why the Neanderthals, proto-human and Ancestors even took effort to migrate so far away across the sea - and where does they get all this idea that there are other lands besides their land?

3) Finlayson did not really elucidate the missing link between apes and man - though he kinds of believing in the idea of evolution. I am not really sure is he couldn't or didn't find the need to do so, but it seems that there are gaps in his explanation about the walking orientation.

Yet, I benefit so much from his ideas of climate effect on the Earth, the timeline he tried to suggest in framing the possible period of each category of man-like creatures, the data on the archaeological evidences, the use of archaeology and its possible limit, and some others. He had mentioned Jared Diamond book in several places in the book, hence, I might find that book too.

[Jason Furman · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book addresses the question of why the neanderthals died out while homo sapiens survived. It rejects the genetic superiority of the later and is scathing on the thesis that homo sapiens played a causal role in the extinction of the neanderthals. Instead, Finlayson argues that the main culprit was the cooling climate. Moreover, he argues that this development disproportionately affected the somewhat more successful neanderthals because they were more used to one way of life, rather than the more marginal and thus more innovative homo sapiens. The analogy he offers is a study in Gibraltar that found that rich families suffered less from diseases from poor water. But when there was a drought and everyone had to drink dirty water the poor survived (because they were resistant) while the rich suffered comparatively more.

It is a somewhat interesting thesis, although marred by the suspicion that one politically motivated narrative (conquest by the superior homo sapiens) is just being replaced with another (climate change combined with a form of moral relativism). The evidence for the later seems thin, especially given the many large climatic changes that took place over the approximately 500,000 years since homo sapiens and neanderthals split off from each other.

As for the writing, two complaints: (1) the author is prone to grandiose statements about how this book differs from the previous literature (e.g., he finds the rejection of the "Out of Africa" hypothesis particularly important, even though he just replaces it with the observation that the eurasian zone was geographically and climatically contiguous with Africa). (2) the first third/half of the book is an uninspired retelling of evolution through about 50,000 years ago.

All of this aside, Finlayson hits his stride in the second half of the book when he focuses on the period from 50,000 years ago (when neanderthals were in Europe but homo sapiens were not) to 10,000 years ago (the end of the last ice age and the invention of agriculture). This is presented with a reasonable amount of detail and grounding in the original scholarly material, to which Finlayson is a contributor.

[Koen Crolla · Rating 3 out of 5]

It seems to be a rule that scientists who complain about systematic oversimplification and arrogance in a field—particularly one that isn't their own but is related to it—never have anything useful to bring to the table themselves, and instead just missed a few shared metaphors. Arguments from incredulity aren't very convincing without data to justify them. (And ironically, when it comes to the evolution of specific features, such as our large brains, as opposed to the history of hominin interactions, it's Finlayson who engages in oversimplification.)

Still, The Humans Who Went Extinct is a pretty passable account of what we know about the history of the genus Homo; less of it is about Neanderthals than the cover promises, but fair enough. There are four things that keep it from being a great work of popular science writing, though: the fact that Finlayson spends a lot of time attacking the hypotheses, real or supposed, of other scientists without first properly laying out what those hypotheses are; the lack of a coherent narrative that renders the writing alternately tedious and confusing (no, our uncertainty about many of the details of human evolution does not preclude such a narrative or mean it necessarily has to be misleading); the focus on listing the plain facts of archaeological and genetic findings instead of going into their possible explanations; and Finlayson's complete inability to understand how a comma works.

So, take it or leave it. It's not bad, certainly, but your time might be spent more productively reading Wikipedia instead.

[lia · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Our ancestors shared the planet with a number of other human forms. We were not alone"
"In the highly unstable world of chance and climate change. Many population of humans simply vanished"
"At 50 thousand Eurasia was occupied only by Neanderthals; by 30 thousand they were all but gone and the land mass was inhabited by the ancestors."

Those are the lines that capture the essence of this book.

The fact that we were not alone was well known to us for some time. But the how and why other human forms vanished is one of the greatest mystery of life.

Clive Finlayson tried to explain this on his book, he wants to point out that the Neanderthals, were not stupid brutes who lose out because we were smarter and better than they are. We were not responsible for their demise.

They were intelligent and resourceful humans who managed to survive far longer than we have walked this earth and in far harsher climate.

But in the end, they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. When finally the climate is too harsh for even them to handle and they died out one by one. The last pocket of Neanderthals managed to survived until 24 thousand years ago, more than 5 thousand years longer than their counterparts. But at that time, they were like Tiger or Panda today. They were on the brink and only a slight push managed to wiped them out completely.

[Richard Reese · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clive Finlayson is an evolutionary ecologist and a champion skeptic. He routinely questions theories based on no evidence, even if they are solidly supported by popular whims, like the widely held belief in the inferiority of Neanderthals. What science now knows about human evolution is something like finding 100 pieces of a 10,000-piece puzzle.

Experts have a strong urge to fill in the blanks with their opinionated imaginations, an approach that is far from trusty. The mindset of mainstream modern science worships Homo sapiens like Hitler worshipped Aryans — the master race — whilst the holy species rips the planet to shreds right before their eyes. For 300,000 years, Neanderthals had the good manners to remain in balance with life, as did most of our ancestors. Good manners are important.

The whims of Ice Age climate patterns are the primary reason why you and I are not gorgeous, sexy, brilliant Neanderthals today, admiring a passing group of wooly rhinos, in a healthy world where bison far outnumber people. Finlayson’s book, The Humans Who Went Extinct, convinced me to reconsider my perception of the human journey. Not many books do that anymore.

The era we live in, the 10,000 years of civilization, human domination, and ecocide, is but a brief flash in the long human journey. Our era is a freak, because the climate has remained relatively warm and stable for an amazingly long time. The pattern of the last 70,000 years has been a roller coaster of surprising climate shifts, from milder & wetter, to colder & drier.

When the glaciers grew, sea levels plunged, forests shrank, countless animals died, and some went extinct. The deer and hippos fled or died, and were replaced by wooly mammoths, wooly rhinos, musk ox, and reindeer. Sea levels 30,000 years ago were 120 meters (400 feet) lower than today. You could walk from England to Holland.

The Younger Dryas cold snap lasted a thousand years, and ended 11,600 years ago. Warm weather melted the glaciers, life migrated northward, forests returned, and the land was filled with abundant megafauna. This was the last waltz for many cold-tolerant megafauna. The breezes were filled with the yummy aroma of sizzling mammoth meat.

In the Middle East, the Natufian culture was developing a sedentary way of life that majored in harvesting the abundant wild cereal seeds. Within a thousand years, folks were experimenting with the dangerous juju of cultivation. Tragically, they could never begin to imagine the unintended consequences of their cleverness.

Many have pointed to agriculture as the father of our disaster. Lately, I’ve been more inclined to point to tool addiction. Hominids were the only apes to move out of the forests and survive. The savannah offered immense amounts of meat, but it was almost impossible to acquire it with just bare hands. Oh-oh!

Once you get started with innovation, is it possible to stop? Yes. The macaques of south Asia break open shellfish with stone axes — they have been tool addicts for ages, but their excellent manners and beautiful small brains protected them from being flushed down the toilet by the Technology Fairy.

The ancestors of the chimps evolved large canine teeth for dining on meat, whilst early hominids developed meat-processing tools instead. Baboons hunt small animals without weapons. Tool-free small-brained monkeys of the American tropics eat a wide variety of jungle critters.

Could large-brained humans ever comprehend the healthy consequences of living tool-free, like the monkeys? There is something deliciously appealing about the notion of living in harmony for millions of years without psych meds and cell phones.

And now, the plot thickens. The Ice Ages did not hammer Africa, Australia, or India. These southern folks continued living in the traditional human manner, as low density, low impact hunter-gatherers. Northerners, on the other hand, stumbled onto a new and dangerous path.

Almost everyone has seen an image of the Venus of Willendorf. She was carved by a member of the Gravettian culture of early humans, which thrived across the chilly treeless plains of Europe, from 30,000 to 22,000 years ago. They were clever folks who loved reindeer stew. They lived in huts with frames made of mammoth bones, covered with hides. They made textiles, baskets, kilns, jewelry, and figurines. They painted the caves at Chauvet and Les Garennes.

Finlayson laments that we modern civilized folks suffer to this very day from the curse of the Gravettians, “who lost their own way and all sense of their Pleistocene heritage.” It was these far-too-clever white folks who created the most diabolical invention of all time — (gasp!) the storage pit.

Southern folks enjoyed a warm climate, and a year-round food supply. Most foods could not be stored, because they would soon spoil. The crazy Gravettians lived in a frigid climate, where all you could see in any direction was endless empty steppe-tundra. Food appeared occasionally, like when migrating herds of reindeer passed through. When they did, the Gravettians hunted like crazy, and stored surplus meat in pits that they had dug in the permafrost.

Finlayson referred to these pits as dangerous toys. “They had found ways of producing surplus, something almost impossible in warm climates, and with it emerged an unstoppable drive to increase rapidly in numbers.” If some surplus was good, then more was better, and you could never have too much. Abundant food led to growing numbers and bad manners. Finlayson emphasizes that our nightmare actually began 30,000 years ago, and agriculture was merely its hideous grandchild.

Later, the weather warmed, and the megafauna were gone. Descendants of the Gravettians tried hunting small game for a while. They learned how to enslave herbivores, which led to domestication. Instead of storing meat in storage pits, they stored living critters in grassy prisons. Others began growing plants for food, and storing the harvest in granaries. By and by, ecosystems fell under human control. Agriculture opened the floodgates to explosive population growth. We embarked on an insane vision of “taming the future.”

Multitudes of living beings were blown off the stage by climate shifts. Finlayson insists that luck may be the most important factor in the evolutionary process. Oddly, if luck had made Neanderthals the winners, and they had the good manners not to invent psych meds and cell phones, and the world of today was an incredible paradise — we’d still be long overdue for a turbulent climate shift.

Reading this book, I was impressed by the incredible resilience of life. Over and over again, forest ecosystems were wiped out and replaced with treeless ecosystems that later changed back to forest ecosystems. Countless species disappeared in this exciting tilt-a-whirl ride of climate shifts, and countless species adapted and evolved. Our ancestors nearly died out 73,500 years ago, following the Mount Toba eruption. A few thousand survived. Today we’re at seven-point-something billion.

This is a small book, but it is jammed with information. We really can’t know who we are, and where we came from, if we don’t understand the turbulent sagas of the Ice Ages. The end of our entire way of life is just a climate shift away. In the past, it was a zigzag between cold and warm. Future zigzags seem likely to be between warm and roasting. Hang on to yer arses, and the best of luck to ye!

[Julio Bernad · Rating 2 out of 5]

¿Por qué se extinguieron los neandertales y nosotros sobrevivimos? Con este excitante subtítulo Finlayson, o los editores de Crítica, intentan seducir a sus potenciales lectores, aficionados a la paleoantropología y curiosos viandantes. La respuesta, si es que alguien la conoce, no la encontraréis en estas páginas. Bueno, quizá una, la vieja confiable que explica porque algunas especies medran cuando otras desaparecen: la suerte, los hechos contingentes que moldean la historia de la vida y la posesión de una caprichosa mutación genética que te hace ser algo más guapo y apto cuando todo tu alrededor se va al carajo.

Los primeros capítulos del ensayos dedicados exclusivamente a las condiciones climáticas globales que permitieron a nuestros antepasados homínidos prosperar en África son los más interesantes de toda la obra. Uno pensaría que, conforme esta fuera avanzando, Finlayson se dedicaría a relacionar estas variaciones climáticas con la aparición de cada nuevo género y especie de nuestro árbol filogenético. Más o menos. Este libro se llama el sueño del Neandertal pero aquí los protagonistas somos nosotros, los sapiens, o más concretamente nuestras migraciones y nuestras culturas líticas. Los neandertales, para cuando llegamos a la mitad del libro, se convierten, o bien en pies de página, o bien son arrollados por una vorágine de nombres y datos climáticos que se repiten una y otra vez hasta imposibilitar el avance del lector. A mi, al menos, me ha ocurrido. Y eso que me he tenido que leer ensayos bastante más sesudos y áridos.

No se cuánto será culpa mía y cuanto del autor, porque llevo una temporada en la que ni el trabajo ni el estudio me dejan disfrutar de lo que leo. Además, como intento justificar las pocas horas de lectura que tengo eligiendo ensayos y obras científicas que refuercen mi temario de oposición, disfruto menos aún estos pocos respiros lectores.

Por último, sí tengo que decir algo que no tiene ni que ver conmigo ni con la obra, pero que cualquier interesado en este tema debe saber para no llevarse una decepción. Este ensayo se escribió hace 14 años. En 14 años se han descubierto a los Denisovanos, una especie de homínido que compartió mundo con sapiens y neandertales, se ha retrasado la fecha de aparición del sapiens y se ha adelantado la de extinción del neandertal. La paleoantropología avanza a una velocidad alarmante, y varias cosas que aparecen en este libro están totalmente anticuadas. Tenedlo en cuenta si dais una oportunidad a Clive Finlayson.

[John Tarttelin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed reading this book because it successfully challenged the Out of Africa thesis that has now become a dogma among the archeological community. I have also just read Chris Stringer's equally interesting volume The Origin Of Species. Stringer describes his Out of Africa 2 thesis, claiming that modern humans originated from an African diaspora c. 55,000 years ago but finishes his book by admitting that the recent discoveries of small hominids in Flores 2004 are totally left out of his model and need explaining.

From both these books it looks extremely likely that as recently as 30,000 years ago, our 'modern' ancestors lived in a world that still contained not just the last of the Neanderthals but also the people of Flores and even the last of the once widespread Homo Erectus population. And, of course, like with the recent discovery of the Denisovians in central Asia, there will undoubtedly be more 'new' hominid species discovered in the future adding to the already bushy complexity of our family tree.

It is fascinating how many cultures from all over the world have stories and myths about 'little people' or yetis, Big Foot and the Orang Pendek of Indonesia etc. We now know that Little People - aka those of Flores - did exist as recently as 18,000 years ago and that their own ancestors had been in the region for 800,000 years.

I have a suspicion that the now out of fashion Multi Regional Theory of human evolution might still surprise us in the future. It would seem that most European have 2-3% Neaderthal DNA while Australian Aborigines have not only a little Neaderthal DNA but even more from the Denisovians - up to 8% overall.

Things have changed a lot since the 1960s when I became interested in the subject. One thing that does grate with me when Mitochondrial DNA studies are spoken of are the massive assumptions made over the supposedly regular and 'constant evolution' of that Mitochondrial DNA. And then they add whopping +s and -s of up to 10,000 years to 'modern human' populations that MIGHT have left Africa c.100,000 to 55,000 years ago. As an historian I would remark that 10,000 years is enough to cover ALL known civilizations known to Man!

I suspect that there were many 'Out of Africa' events but I also suspect that isolated small populations of Homo Erectus evolved into types of 'modern humans' elsewhere over the globe. Erectus was around for 1.75 to 2 million years. They were not sat around on their hairy behinds for all that length of time just waiting to be replaced or superseded by more 'modern' relatives.

Finlayson makes a lot of archaic humans moving west from central Asia when steppeblands swept across a warming globe, taking only 1,000 years to reach the Atlantic - and his thesis here is very persuasive. Above all he points out the huge part CHANCE has had in our evolution. As Richard Fortey has said, evolution can only 'work' on the material it has on hand. We now know Darwin was wrong in a very important respect. It is NOT the survival of the fittest - it is the survival of the LUCKIEST. When that asteroid hit 65 million years ago - the dinosaurs never had a chance, particularly as the massive volcanic activity going on in the Deccan Traps of India was already polluting the world with noxious gases and effecting climate change.

According to Stringer, Finlayson et al, the Toba eruption 70,000 years ago prevented 'modern humans' expanding further than India for hundreds of years. How many such explosions wiped out other nascent human ancestors whose remains have yet to be found? There is still a great deal we do not know. Just where did the Flores folk originate? Just how did the white skinned Ainu population get to the very north of modern Japan before the 'Japanese'?

Similarly the Kennewick skull discovered on the west coast of North America with its European features during a time when only Native Americans were 'supposed' to live there, throws another spanner in the works. There there are those famous Clovis point spears found in the American south west which are identical to the spears used by the Soulutreans of south west France who might have migrated WEST to America along the ice shore during a period of massive glaciation with glaciers as far south as the Bay of Biscay.

In conclusion, we should enjoy these stimulating books while we can but also 'watch this space'. In the 1960s only 'humans' spoke, used tools, had emotions and could plan for the future. Since then, amongst other amazing animal abilities which we have discovered, a clever chimp in Japan has beaten every human in memory recall when numbers (which humans ought to know about) are flashed onto a computer screen for tiny fractions of a second. That chimp destroyed all human competition. A lesson in humility we should remember when we speak of our 'ancient' ancestors or of 'early' hominids etc..

[Priscilla Long · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finlayson takes the available evidence and questions conclusions often drawn from it, and that is its great strength. In the end the big question is, does the evidence point to the conclusion that we were more cognitively advanced than were they. Answer: No. The book covers many issues and goes back an forth in geologic time periods and could benefit from more charts and maps.

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incredibly interesting if you're into general and human evolution, volcanoes, climate change, animal extinctions. A very well-written and engaging book, bringing all the recent findings in the field together. I really enjoyed it!

[Judyta Szacillo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Human evolution shown as mainly climate-driven. I liked the Author's distance to many over-interpretations of the source material. I didn't like the erratic punctuation (very confusing at times).

[Ted · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The Neanderthals became a tough, well-built people. They had large brains, even bigger than ours, and they lived across Europe and northern Asia as far as eastern Siberia and perhaps even into Mongolia and China."

[Lissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

The common view of Neaderthals, at least in popular society, is that of dumb brutes who were conquered by our ancestors' superior mental capacities and skills. Many are probably influenced by Clan of the Cave Bear, in which the Neaderthals were dark, hulking, and relatively unintelligent compared to the blonde, beautiful, willowy, and smart Daryl Hannah.

But what if none of that was true?

Finlayson argues that we are "children of chance," that our ancestors weren't necessarily superior to the Neanderthals and those other human branches that came before us - just different, and better suited to the changing environment. If things had gone just a little differently, the humans of today would be descended from the Neaderthals, or some other branch, and would be pondering over the bones of our ancestors today, wondering why they were the ones who survived.

It's an interesting premise, and the book itself is an interesting read. Littered with information that was new to me - Neanderthals weren't all dark (in fact, some of them had red hair, which is tied to having light skin), and we have no idea how often they came in contact with our ancestors if at all - Finlayson argues that our ancestors were less like conquerors and more like lucky lottery winners. The environment changed in such a way that the lighter-bodied Homo Sapiens were favored in the end.

My only real complaint was that Finlayson seemed allergic to commas, which lead to some rambling sentences that I had to read a few times to get his meaning. Other than that, an intriguing look at our early history, and it makes one wonder what might have been if things had only been a little different.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an interesting overview of human evolution. Finlayson does not go into a lot of details about the various known species of early humans, but tends to talk about generalities and the big picture. It's a fairly short book and he covers a huge amount of prehistory, so he necessarily doesn't examine things in great depth. The thing that spoiled it for me was the author's tone when talking about other paleontologists; he's always griping that they're overusing the small amount of evidence they have to make sweeping declarations about what these species did and what they were like. Which may well be true, but he sounds so terribly stuck on himself and his theories that those parts were unpleasant to read.

[Steve Wiggins · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good introduction to Neanderthals, but the book also covers other early humans as well. There's a lot of good information here, but it feels a bit dated. Discoveries happen so quickly that it's hard to know where things stand with ancestors at the moment. Non-technical, it is fairly quick reading, but it does make you stop and think about how humans interact with other related species. I wrote a bit more about this one on my blog: Sects and Violence in the Ancient World.

[A. J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars. Nice summary of aspects of human evolution. We have a paucity of artefacts, fossils... and yet many "experts" over interpet the limited data to paint a complete picture. Finlayson displays such predictions as going a bit too far on too limited information. He often then guesses as to what the limited data mean as well. He has good rationale, logic... but alas as he points out, there is little hard data to work with. A good read.

[Einar Snorri · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ágætar pælingar í bókinni, en það vantaði meginþema eða tilgang með henni. Það er ekki nóg að skrifa 200 bls af pælingum, það verður eitthvað að binda þær saman. Fyrir vikið verður lesturinn ekki eins skemmtilegur og hann ætti að vera miðað við efniviðinn.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting take on human evolution and why the marginalised will inherit the Earth.

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cool read, though you will have to wade through some material to get to the good stuff. A great overview, though.

[Dr. Christopher M Rayner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating review of current knowledge and opinion on human evolution

The author has dedicated his professional career to the research and understanding of early human society and evolution. I do wonder to what extent his conclusions are shared by his contemporary colleagues, and, to be fair, he occasionally points out areas of disagreement.
His central thesis consists of his belief that the survivors, and therefore, our ancestors, of primitive humanity were those who lived on the margins of prehistoric human communities. These folk were not the central part of their human societies; rather, they were the least considered. They were, of necessity, the first to develop and adopt novel foods and techniques to exploit the less than ideal environments. Thus, when changes came, largely driven by climatic alterations, they were best equipped to survive, while those in occupation of the prime territory perished as they were unable to adapt.
This is a fascinating idea; we are all descendants of the outcasts and exiles of prehistory. Or of the adventurers and pioneers. The categories overlap. As he freely admits, the evidence is scanty, and far from unambiguous. He predicts that with the anticipated ecodisaster of climate change the likely survivors will also be the marginal communities of today. A comforting idea for all of us who are not among the global elite, although that may exclude most, if not all of the readers of the book.

[GBL · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this intelligent and well written book, easily accessible to the general reader, Clive Finlayson explores the reasons for the demise of the Neanderthal population in the context of human history.

Finlayson details many of the competing theories of human development and then shows how he sees the various strands of human development. He is keen to emphasise the significance of luck as an element of human development and challenges the view that the march towards a peak of human progress has been neat and somehow inevitable. He emphasises the importance of the innovators, the ones who have to scrabble for existence, in human development for they have had to adapt in the face of changing circumstances to survive. It is this that lead to the loss of the Neanderthal strand in human development for they were conservative in their lifestyle, unable to respond effectively to changing climate and environment.

As he looks to the future of human life he argues that;
“ The children of chance.... will once again be the most capable of survival.”
(p 220)

[Evan K · Rating 4 out of 5]

The narrative in this book may be a bold one, if not a controversial one: Neanderthals were not inferior and we (Homo Sapiens) are only here today due to luck. But at no point in this book was I skeptical or unconvinced. In fact, the subtleties of our ancient past feel familiar to me already.

The author, Clive Finlayson, a professional in this field, displays clear passion in his writing. A lot of the details of this topic are strongly debated by scholars, and what I like is that he considers a wide range of theories before reaching a conclusion, and has done all the appropriate research. It was a nice to read. I would say above average in difficulty/info density.

The only downside is that, when telling the story of our evolution, the book jumps around a bit chronologically. As someone quite new to this topic, I found it a bit confusing. But maybe that's just me.

[Ian Hulstein · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is not really a book about Neanderthals. I probably would have enjoyed it more if I hadn't been looking for specific information. As such, I was kinda annoyed with the misleading title.
This is more a book about ice age climatic conditions and about why homo sapiens survived.
The ultimate conclusion is that luck is the main reason we survived and Neanderthals did not.
This is a conclusion which would only surprise those deeply steeped in paleoanthropology. To write a whole book about it seems rather silly, but it does counter the popular idea that we somehow out-competed or annihilated them, so I suppose it has its place.

[Ken · Rating 3 out of 5]

Finlayson theorizes that climate-change was the dominant factor in the five or six million years of human evolution, and it was the ability to rapidly react to climate swings and ecological conditions that made it possible for some human populations to ultimately succeed while many others did not. He argues that the fertile crescent theory on the birth of agriculture is too simple and suggests many species of Hominids were spread around the globe before the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago. He concludes that just because humans occupy the planet now really is no guarantee that we will still be here twenty millennia from now. Interesting read.

[Matthew Dambro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting volume on human origins. According to Finlayson the success of Homo Sapiens was largely a matter of luck. They hit the "sweet spot" after the ice ages and were innovators, living on the fringe. Roughly thirty species of hominids met extinction through bad luck and being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I do not know enough anthropology to make an estimate of his research but his writing is clear and concise.