Why Did Ancient Europeans Just Disappear 14,500 Years Ago?

http://www.livescience.com/53883-ancient-europeans-vanished-after-ice-age.html

by diodorus • 10 years ago

93 54 10 years ago

cfcef• 10 years ago

It's always 'climate change'. Dozens of megafauna disappear? 'climate change'. Whole tribes with fortifications suddenly disappear? 'climate change'. Wholesale population replacement? 'climate change'. It's our age's "peoples don't migrate, pots do". It's gotten to the point that when I read about the latest population genetics result show introgression or replacement and they invoke 'climate change', I no longer know if it's a case where it could be climate change or just the usual total refusal to speculate about pre-historic warfare and predation.

galago• 10 years ago

These things aren't mutually exclusive. I think there are events that occurred around periods of climate change, which may have caused changes in animal or human migration. This could lead to warfare, or even more simply disease transmission.

orionblastar2• 10 years ago

We see climate change affecting the Middle East as it dries up sources of water and forces people to migrate or move to the populated cities that have a water source.

It has also caused a refugee crisis as people can't get food or water and flee their nation to go some place else to live.

It has also allowed terrorists to rise up in Syria and Iraq and take over weakened cities that had water sources dry up and people left unable to defend those cities from takeover by terrorists.

So I imagine back during the Ice Age, people moved around as well as struggled to survive. Some lost their food and water sources and turned to warfare on other tribes to survive. People who hung out in southern Europe where the climate was not too bad had a better chance of survival than people who lived on ice sheets up north.

WalterBright3• 10 years ago

We've had nearly continuous warfare for the last 2,000 years. I've read a number of history books on it, and none have suggested climate change as being a cause, or even a factor.

justinator• 10 years ago

I mean, reason why humans left Africa, walked upright and grew big brains?

Climate change.

Think about how many times you control your local micro climate around you. Think about how many times you talk about the weather with whomever.

It's a big force in the human condition.

restalis4• 10 years ago

"Think about how many times you talk about the weather with whomever."

About as many as the moments in which we have to talk with somebody but lack something better to break the ice!

__________

P.S.: I've read so far about a number of possible cases for which humans started to walk upright and none had climate change as a primary cause.

agumonkey• 10 years ago

The day to day thermodynamics.

antocv2• 10 years ago

I agree, it is kind of obvious, wherever human appear, megafauna disappear, from Europe to South America. Oh must be climate change.

It could be climate change, but that doesnt explain anything, since its so far reaching and general.

Maybe this latest global warming/climate change, is not the first time humans had an impact on climate? Its certainly not the first time any species had an impact on climate, looking at you cyanobacteria.

oblio2• 10 years ago

It's hard to believe that with such a low population, no industry and no agriculture humans could have made a real impact on climate change.

mcv• 10 years ago

Is the end of an ice age not a form of climate change then?

A fact of the matter is that a lot of evolution is driven by constantly changing climates. The supervolcanos and asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs also did so through climate change: too much dust in the air and too little sunlight made the land colder, killed much of the plants, and made resources more scarce. Small warm-blooded animals suddenly had the edge.

It is a bit of a catch-all, though. Just "climate change" doesn't tell you much. Receding glaciers and more accessible land tells you a lot more.

arethuza2• 10 years ago

And its not like the last ice age just neatly stopped - there was a significant cooling period during the Younger Dryas which wasn't quite a bad as a full Ice Age but was still pretty severe:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas

kafkaesq2• 10 years ago

It's always 'climate change'.

No -- if you read their arguments more closely, what they suspect is that some populations were able to adapt to sudden climate change, while others were not.

So really, it's about adaptability.

MichalSikora• 10 years ago

In my opinion not always "climate change" but one of the main factor. For me main factor is opportunity to moder human to acclimate for this factores. Yes, climate changes are important but more value is respond for that e.g. better groups organisation, better equipment. In that time if you do not acclimate quick you died

jhildings• 10 years ago

Maybe because they didn't learn to write proper headlines explaining the content of an article ?

Kaius• 10 years ago

Its peculiar that a group with a specific DNA marker would be wiped out so completely by climate change while another group was not (or at least prospered at a later time in the same region).

Could this more easily be explained by an aggressive disease or plague that wiped out anyone it contacted and the separation of the 2 groups (N and M) in different locations protected enough of the N group for it to prosper. Also isolated pockets of M carriers who had migrated beyond the infected area survived.

restalis4• 10 years ago

"Could this more easily be explained by an aggressive disease or plague that wiped out anyone it contacted"

This sounds so familiar! "The previous local populations just vanished and we, the current inhabitants, had nothing to do with it, cross my heart!"

The dramatic change should have been very beneficial to the hunter-gatherers. They survived so long in tundra but they somehow couldn't cope with the abundance of plants and plant eating venison brought along? Come on! It's more likely that the previous harsh conditions weren't that inviting for the better hunters of N type super-haplogroup living somewhere else, and as soon as that changed so did the hunting lands' owners!

JoeAltmaier2• 10 years ago

Disease is nothing to sneeze at! One new virus could quite possibly have wiped out an entire population (as it did so often in more recent human history). The end of the glaciers was the perfect condition to increase mobility and thus disease vectors.

In fact, this is so inevitable we'd have to explain why it couldn't happen, before speculating on less-likely scenarios?

cellularmitosis• 10 years ago

Those who find this interesting might also find the theories of Randall Carlson interesting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R31SXuFeX0A

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0Cp7DrvNLQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDejwCGdUV8

Why Did Ancient Europeans Just Disappear 14,500 Years Ago?

Related Stories