Northern Neanderthals: Adjustment To Shifting Environmental Circumstances

An interdisciplinary study team studied whether Neanderthals were well suited to frigid environments or favored more warm ones.

The researchers have found that during the last Ice Age, Neanderthals revisited their northernmost habitation places even during cold periods, but more frequently in the summer months, based on the study conducted in Lichtenberg in the Wendland region (Lower Saxony, Germany).

Neanderthals on climate factors

(Photo : STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN/AFP via Getty Images)

Were Neanderthals truly as well suited to cold weather as previously thought, or did they choose more mild climatic circumstances during the last Ice Age?

To find answers to these concerns, researchers should look to Neanderthal sites on the northern outskirts of their range.

After all, it was then that climate conditions were most obvious, owing to recurrent ice incursions from Scandinavia.

Northern Germany, with its numerous recorded Neanderthal sites, is an ideal location for such research.

Scientists from MPI-EVA, FAU, Leuphana University Lüneburg, LIAG, and other regional organisations have studied the bones of Neanderthals along a former shoreline in Lichtenberg, Wendland (Lower Saxony).

The team used an integrative research strategy, combining analytical tools from archaeology, fluorescence dating, depositional, micromorphology, and pollen and phytolith studies to investigate the link between human presence in the north and changing environmental factors in depth.

The window to environmental history

Archaeological discoveries provide a glimpse into natural history, explained by Michael Hein, an MPI-EVA geographer.

"We can recreate the vegetative cover and climatic circumstances of the time depending on the sediments and pollen grains they encompass, which requires the most accurate dating possible, which in the case of Central Europe is still lacking for several climatological stages of the last Ice Age," as per ScienceDaily.

Accumulating ecologic information in order to complete impartial dating is of considerable interest to archaeology and paleoenvironmental studies alike.

In Lichtenberg, they have now achieved in dating to 90,000 years the end of a marked warm phase - the so-called Brörup Interstadial, Hein continues.

Also Read: Neanderthal's Extinction May Be Caused By an Entirely Different Reason

Neanderthals

Neanderthal (Homo neanderthalensis, Homo sapiens neanderthalensis), also spelled Neandertal, member of the group of prehistoric human people that emerged at least 200,000 years ago during the Pleistocene Period (about 2.6 million to 11,700 years ago) and were supplanted or absorbed by modern period human populations (Homo sapiens) between 35,000 and possibly 24,000 years ago, according to Britannica.

Neanderthals occupied Eurasia from the Atlantic parts of Europe eastward to Central Asia, from present-day Belgium to the Mediterranean and southwest Asia.

Similar archaic human groups existed in eastern Asia and Africa during the same period.

Neanderthals were thought to be genetically, physically, and behaviorally separate from contemporary humans until the late twentieth century.

Recent findings regarding this well-preserved ancient Eurasian population, on the other hand, have indicated an overlap between living and archaic humans.

Neanderthals lived in some of the harshest settings ever seen by humans before and throughout the Pleistocene cold period.

They created a prosperous civilization centered on hunting, scavenging, and local plant collecting, with a complex stone tool technology.

Their survival during the last glacial for tens of thousands of years is a remarkable tribute to human adaptability.