Neanderthals Extinction

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The journal article “Climatic conditions for the last Neanderthals: Herpetofaunal record of Gorham's Cave, Gibraltar,” centers on the last evidence of Neanderthals extinction in the cave and first evidence of modern humans. The article, addresses the question, could it have been the terrestrial climate change in the late Pleistocene sequence of Gorham’s cave, Southern Iberia that caused Neanderthals extinction. The data collected to address this question started with fieldwork by sorting herpetofuana fossil remains consisted of separated and broken up bone fragments at Gorham’s cave. These fossils collection included a diverse amount of amphibians and reptiles. The second part of the experiment was to use the Mutual Climatic Range method on…show more content…
However winter was colder then, they had four dry months and currently there are five. The climate was Meditarrian-like, semi-arid, and semi-humid. Heavy levels of raining could have also played a pivotal role in the survival of the Neanderthals in southern Iberia which is why they are proposing that because Neanderthals lived in woodland habitats, the lessening of rain could have made survival even harder for Neanderthals to survive outside of Iberia. Ultimately Iberia, a much warmer region, was the glacial refuge for Neanderthals during harsh winter weather. The key finding in this paper is that Neanderthals had to seek other habitats to live where the air was warm with heavy rainfalls in order to survive. The question being addressed and the key finding are significant because if Neanderthals have adapted before to cold weather for 300,000 years what made this time any different which leads to another key finding. The Mutual Climatic Range method was used on a particular tortoise, Testudo hermanni that its current distribution to the Iberian Peninsula did not correspond to its climatic range because of human
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