A Stone-Age Meeting of Minds

By Thomas Wynn, Frederick L. Coolidge

Neandertals became extinct while Homo sapiens prospered. A marked contrast in mental capacities may account for these different fates

Anthropology Biology Evolution Animal Behavior Archaeology

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January-February 2008

Volume 96, Number 1
Page 44

DOI: 10.1511/2008.69.44

More than 40 millennia ago, bands of Homo sapiens trekked up the Danube River into central Europe. There they ran into the native Neandertals (Homo neanderthalensis), who were also formidable hunter-gatherers and who had similarly survived dramatic, even catastrophic, shifts in climate over the preceding 40,000 years. Strangely enough, the two had met before.

© Natural History Museum, London

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