Neanderthal Biological Anthropology

Summary: The main questions this article sets out to try and answer are “what precisely killed them [the Neanderthals] off? And do the differences [in the Neanderthal’s and Homo sapiens’ lifestyles] explain the disappearance of the Neanderthals?” First off, the article dismisses the popular belief that the Neanderthals were killed off by the Homo sapiens. It is proven that the Neanderthals interbred with the Homo sapiens (approximately 2 to 3 percent of all humans that are non-African origin have a small amount of Neanderthal DNA). Then the theory of cultural buffering, which means the group’s capacity to adapt and survive in challenging changing environmental conditions. The article theorizes the Homo sapiens had a more sophisticated cultural buffer because of a protection from scarcity. This protection was a division of labor, which meant the women and children gather …show more content…
Now, the Neanderthal is a part of the same family (Hominidae) and genus (Homo) as modern day humans but are different are a different species (neanderthalensis). Studying the Neanderthals leads biological anthropologists to discover more about the different types of Hominidae that had once lived on this earth and who our ancestral Homo sapiens interact with during their appearance. Also, the article mentions that the modern day humans (Homo sapiens) have Neanderthal DNA because of the interbreeding between them and the ancestral Homo sapiens. This is also important to biological anthropology because genetics is an important section in biological anthropology. Without genetics biological anthropology would not be a field of study. Biological anthropologists need genetics to understand species variation and evolution of species. These are a couple of reasons why this article relates to the field of biological