Neanderthals 'not killed by climate change'

Study suggests demise did not coincide with climate cooling.

Michael Hopkin

Whatever it was that sealed the fate of the Neanderthals, it looks unlikely to have been climate change. That is the verdict of a new study that used climate records from Venezuela to deduce what happened at the Neanderthals' last stand at the southern tip of Europe.

The research suggests that a switch to a cold, dry climate was probably not the telling factor in the demise of the Neanderthals, because of all the probable dates for their extinction, most do not lie near major cold events in the climate record.