Lucky Humans

This is an interesting theory which totally contradicts conventional wisdom that humans were either evolutionarily superior or that the first genocide was committed by humans against our neanderthal cousins.

From Newsweek...

Winners—of prehistory no less than history—get to write the textbooks. So it is no surprise that we, the children of the humans who replaced Neanderthals, "portray ourselves in the role of victors and reduce the rest [of the human lineage] to the lower echelons of vanquished," Finlayson writes. In a provocative new book, The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived, he argues that "a slight change of fortunes and the descendants of the Neanderthals would today be debating the demise of those other people that lived long ago."

Moderns were very, very lucky—so lucky that Finlayson calls what happened "survival of the weakest." About 30,000 years ago, the vast forests of Eurasia began to retreat, leaving treeless steppes and tundra and forcing forest animals to disperse over vast distances. Because they evolved in the warm climate of Africa before spreading into Europe, modern humans had a body like marathon runners, adapted to track prey over such distances. But Neanderthals were built like wrestlers. That was great for ambush hunting, which they practiced in the once ubiquitous forests, but a handicap on the steppes, where endurance mattered more.

This is the luck part: the open, African type of terrain in which modern humans evolved their less-muscled, more-slender body type "subsequently expanded so greatly" in Europe, writes Finlayson. And that was "pure chance."