Oren Kolodny: Climate Change and Stanford University

oren kolodny: The search for an explanation has produced many theories including climate change, epidemics, or inability to compete with the modern humans, who may have had some mental or cultural edge, according to CTV. The new study isn't intended to argue against those factors, but just to show that they're not needed to explain the extinction, says Oren Kolodny of Stanford University. Our close evolutionary cousins enjoyed a long run in Europe and Asia, but they disappeared about 40,000 years ago after modern humans showed up from Africa. He and colleague Marcus Feldman present their approach in a paper released Tuesday by the journal Nature Communications. These local populations were randomly chosen to go extinct, and then be replaced by another randomly chosen population, with no regard for whether it represented the same species. They based their conclusion on a computer simulation that represented small bands of Neanderthals and modern humans in Europe and Asia. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.