Frederick E. Grine

PaleontologyHomo erectus: Pleistocene Evidence from the Middle Awash, Ethiopia.The Middle Awash Series, Volume 1. Edited byW.HenryGilbertand, BerhaneAsfaw. Berkeley (California): University of California Press.

Paleolithic times (circa 45,000–25,000 years ago). Finlayson challenges this assumption, arguing instead that hominins have always been generalist feeders whose diets widened and contracted interactively with changes in habitat and paleoenvironmental shifts. He supports this hypothesis with evidence that Neanderthals broadened their diets to include shellfish and marine mammals, resources formerly thought to have first been exploited systematically by Homo sapiens. The title of the book refers to the Neanderthals, an extinct hominin population who lived in Europe and western Asia between 200,000 – 35,000 years ago. In Gibraltar, Finlayson has led an international team investigating the youngest-dated Neanderthal sites. The conventional wisdom about Neanderthals is that they became extinct either by being competitively displaced by Homo sapiens or by being absorbed into expanding Homo sapiens populations. Evidence from the Gibraltar caves shows instead that Neanderthals survived much later than previously thought, as recently as 29,000 years ago, long after Homo sapiens populations had established themselves in neighboring regions. In this volume, Finlayson argues that it was neither competition nor assimilation that finally did in the Neanderthals, but rapid climate change. Paleoclimatic evidence from marine sediment cores and polar ice deposits preserve evidence for a series of rapid shifts to extreme cold conditions (“Heinrich events”) between 75,000–10,000 years ago. In Europe and the Near East, these cold events mark inflection points in the fossil record. Specifically, Neanderthal fossils cease being deposited, and artifacts and fossils referable to Homo sapiens both begin to appear. The driving force behind these Heinrich events is the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation; the very same oceanic current now imperiled by accelerated polar ice melting. When this current stops, Europe freezes. The simple answer to the book’s subtitle, Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived, is that they were living in Europe when these Heinrich events occurred and Homo sapiens were not. The fate of European Homo sapiens is not the fate of the species. If a Heinrich event depopulated Europe in the near future, that subcontinent would be repopulated by humans from warmer climates. Nevertheless, this vision of the fate of the Neanderthals is a clear reminder that global warming and climate change are among our most pressing contemporary issues. Engaging and well written, this volume will be essential reading for anyone interested in human evolution. Paired with a textbook to cover the nitty-gritty details of the genetic, fossil, and archeological evidence, The Humans Who Went Extinct will be an excellent spur for discussion in college-level courses in human evolution. It is an essential purchase for college and university libraries. John J. Shea, Anthropology, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York