by Wil Roebroeks; Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, P.O. Box 9515, 2300RA Leiden, The Netherlands
http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/10.1016/j.jhevol.2008.08.008
Ice core studies have taught us that the time span of Middle and Upper Paleolithic was punctuated by rapid climatic transitions on timescales of centuries or even decades (Adams et al., 1999). Vegetation responses to such rapid fluctuations must have varied on small scales among sites and regions, according to the differences in initial environmental conditions, local and regional species pool, and the climate events concerned, and the same applies to faunal elements, including Neandertals and modern humans. Various authors have suggested that such climatic fluctuations were instrumental in the disappearance of the Neandertals, one of the latest climatic hypotheses having been presented by Mellars (2006) who suggests that their final demise may have coincided with the sudden onset of the much colder and drier conditions of the Heinrich Event 4. However, extremes of temperatures reached during this period were not exceptional, and had been experienced in earlier glacial-interglacial cycles survived by Neandertals, where the extremes of OIS 4 and 6 led to abandonment of the northern parts of Europe, as did the most extreme parts of OIS 2, for modern humans (e.g., Roebroeks et al., 1992). Recently Tzedakis et al. (2007) have also made the point that climate change was probably not the key factor here, as before 28 ka 14C BP (i.e., according to most of the papers in this volume long after their demise) Neandertals would have faced a pattern of climatic fluctuations that they had been surviving for at least 100,000 years already.
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