Why Shanidar Cave Matters in the Long View

Archaeology of the Neanderthal period tends to be discussed in terms of what it reveals about a disappeared population.

The Neanderthals are gone.

They vanished from the fossil and archaeological record approximately 40,000 years ago, at roughly the same time that anatomically modern humans were expanding into Europe.

The specific mechanism of their disappearance is debated.

Competition with modern humans for the same ecological resources, demographic absorption through interbreeding, disease brought by modern human populations, or some combination of factors — the evidence does not currently support a single clean explanation.

The genetic record shows that the direction of interbreeding was asymmetric: Neanderthal genetic material entered the modern human population, but the reverse flow was smaller.