Archaeologists Just Discovered Why Neanderthals Disappeared

French Archaeologist and "Neanderthal hunter" Ludovic Slimak has spent three decades walking river valleys and climbing into hidden shelters from the Horn of Africa to the Arctic Circle, but nowhere has shaped his thinking more than a quiet rock shelter in the Rhône Valley of southeastern France called Grotte Mandrin. Slimak began digging there as a young man and has returned season after season for more than twenty years, carefully peeling back layers of silt left by the Mistral winds. Those deposits have become, in his hands, a time machine.

Later, other waves followed, associated with the Châtelperronian between forty-six and forty-five thousand years ago and the Proto-Aurignacian around forty-two thousand. These were not stray scouts but organized communities capable of spreading an entire technical tradition across thousands of miles.


SOURCES:
SLIMAK, Ludovak, "The Naked Neanderthal"