Who doesn’t enjoy a good mystery? The CSI franchise of television crime dramas ranks among the most popular TV programs in the world. Another scientific whodunit could be even more intriguing than any episode of CSI: What caused Neanderthals to become extinct? Researchers have run into unexpected twists and turns in the drama as they’ve applied increasingly sophisticated scientific methods to solve this mystery.1
Neanderthals appear in the fossil record around 200,000 to 150,000 years ago and lived in the Middle East, Europe, and western Asia. Many paleoanthropologists believe these hominids went extinct around 28,000 to 30,000 years ago. Since humans made their way into Europe around 40,000 years ago, they must have coexisted there with Neanderthals for perhaps as long as 10,000 years…more at reason to believe…more
