ecosystem importance: Neanderthal disappearance (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, October 04, 2022, 18:34 (576 days ago) @ David Turell

A study in Iberia:

https://ecoevocommunity.nature.com/videos/ecosystem-productivity-affected-the-spatiotem...

"One of the main hypotheses proposed to explain the decline of Neanderthals is directly related to the abrupt, rapid and sharp climatic oscillations during MIS3, since they could have pushed ecosystems towards catastrophic results. Furthermore, the rapid colonization by modern humans into Europe, coexisting with Neanderthals for several millennia, may not have created a favourable scenario for the latter, posing a threat to their behavioural flexibility and resilience as a species. Thus, the influence that these two factors might have played on the diverse ecosystems the Neanderthals exploited, and therefore their subsistence strategies, are poorly understood. At the end of the day, independent of the technology and culture they might have developed, feeding was a necessity for survival. Thus, in our SUBSILIENCE project, funded by the European Research Council (Ref. 818299), assessing subsistence strategies, including the types of hunted prey and the ways those herbivores were exploited, and which kinds of climates and environments both humans species had to face are critical for evaluating the success of our species on the one hand, but the decay of Neanderthals on the other.

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"Understanding how, during stadial and interstadial phases, in the different ecological regions of Iberia, climate change affected Net Primary Productivity (NPP) is relevant to estimating ecosystem carrying capacity. NPP is the biomass of all plant species, which is the basis of herbivore diets. In turn the herbivores were the main contributors to human diets. However, this approach has never been thoroughly understood, especially considering the spatio-temporal variations that environments underwent during the Pleistocene.

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"Our results reveal that, in the Eurosiberian region of northern Spain, a significant drop in the available biomass of secondary consumers coincided with the disappearance of Neanderthal groups, while the arrival of the modern humans in this particular region, a few millennia afterwards, coincided with an increase in herbivore carrying capacity. It is in the three Mediterranean regions (supra, meso and thermo), where the most stable conditions and the highest biomass of medium and medium-large herbivores are observed during the 20,000 years covered by this study, even during stadial phases. Ungulates such as red deer, ibex or horse, among others, composed the main daily protein intake for both human species. Whether the meso and thermomediterranean regions, in particular, provided a more stable ecological scenario that could have extended Neanderthals' persistence there until 32,000 years ago in La Boja and Cova Anton sites in Murcia (SE Spain), would explain the longer persistence of Neanderthals in the meridional latitudes of Iberia. However, while the cause/s of the final Neanderthal remain/s unknown, this study advances our knowledge of how and why human species and ecology varied spatiotemporally in SW Europe during the period between 50,000 and 30,000 years ago."

Comment: if you cannot eat you got to leave or die!!! Helps explain the Neanderthal die out. And again, tells us ecosystems come and go, and leave dead ends!!