CAMBRIDGE, England, July 28 (UPI) -- European Neanderthals may have abruptly disappeared after 300,000 years of domination simply because they were outnumbered by rivals, British researchers say.
Scientists from the University of Cambridge say research shows modern humans coming to Europe from Africa swarmed the region, overwhelming the Neanderthal inhabitants with 10 times their population.
The capacity of the local Neanderthal groups to compete with Homo sapiens for the same living sites, the same animal food supplies and the same scarce fuel supplies to survive the extremely harsh glacial winters would have been massively undermined, a Cambridge release said.
"Faced with this kind of competition, the Neanderthals seem to have retreated initially into more marginal and less attractive regions of the continent and eventually -- within a space of at most a few thousand years -- for their populations to have declined to extinction," Cambridge archaeology Professor Paul Mellars said.
The cause of the relatively sudden disappearance of the European Neanderthal populations across the continent about 40,000 years ago has been one of the great mysteries of human evolution. Researchers say the Cambridge findings may offer a plausible answer to this long-debated question.
