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Mikhail Polyakov

Why the Neanderthals died out: historian Peter Sahlins on how explanations bend to the anxieties of their time, and how to tell a hypothesis from a headline

Level: BeginnerReading time: 6 min

Topics: Science, History

Ancient stone tools on a museum pedestal beneath an old mirror with a distorted reflection of the hall

Short answer: there is no single answer to why the Neanderthals disappeared. Many explanations have been proposed: from displacement or absorption by our species to disease and climate change. Historian Peter Sahlins, in his new book "Neanderthals Among Us: The Making of a Prehistoric Human," shows that the choice of explanation often says something about the anxieties of the time in which it is proposed. Live Science published an excerpt from the book on October 11, 2026. His argument: after the COVID-19 epidemic, the disease explanation gained strength; against the background of talk about climate, the climate explanation grew; and newspapers sometimes turn a scientific study into a headline about the issue of the day. This is a historian's view, not a new study. But it is useful to anyone who reads news about ancient people.

Who the author is and what this text is

Peter Sahlins is a historian. His book was published by Oneworld Publications in 2026. On the Live Science page, the book card also lists the American edition from Harvard University Press. In the excerpt Live Science published, he goes through explanations of the Neanderthals' disappearance and the philosophical conclusions drawn about the Neanderthals. According to the book's description, Sahlins treats Neanderthals as a distorting mirror in which people see their ideas about human uniqueness and their anxieties about differences between people.

It is important to understand the genre. This is not a scientific paper with new data, but an excerpt from a book on the history of science. The judgments in it are the author's opinion.

What explanations exist

Sahlins writes that between "violent extermination" and "peaceful absorption" with cultural exchange, prehistorians propose a wide range of explanations. In the excerpt he discusses three in detail.

Disease. According to Sahlins, the idea that arriving people of our species brought diseases against which Neanderthals had no protection gained weight during and after the COVID-19 epidemic. He refers to a 2024 study in which, as he describes it, a 50,000-year-old case of herpes was found in a reconstructed viral genome. And to Jonathan Kennedy's 2023 book "Pathogenesis": Kennedy argued that our species was less vulnerable to Neanderthal diseases because it arrived in much larger numbers and had immune systems shaped in the tropics.

Climate. Sahlins writes that over the last twenty years, the idea that climate change was the main cause has been gaining more and more weight. He links this to our own anxiety about climate. The variants are:

  • the Campanian Ignimbrite eruption near Naples, now dated to about 39,280 years ago, plus or minus 110 years; according to Sahlins, it has been talked about since 2007;
  • sharp climate swings. Sahlins cites a National Geographic headline of February 9, 2004, "Climate Change Killed the Neanderthals." The headline followed the work of an international team of thirty scientists who worked for more than seven years. It found general climatic instability and a severe cooling around 41,000 years ago that lasted six centuries;
  • the search for the "last Neanderthal" in warm southern refuges. Clive Finlayson argued that Neanderthals could have lived in Gibraltar as late as 29,000 years ago. According to Sahlins, there are other candidates for that title: a skeleton from Zafarraya in Spain dated to 30,000 years ago, about which there are skeptics, and finds from the Mezmaiskaya Cave in the Caucasus.

Sahlins notes that the climate explanation has a weak point: it has to explain why people of our species survived the same harsh conditions.

Conservatism. The third explanation: the Neanderthals died out because they clung to the old, while our species could invent the new. Sahlins names Philip Lieberman's 2013 book "The Unpredictable Species" as the main statement of this idea and writes that it is a widely shared belief.

Where, according to Sahlins, science mixes with the concerns of the time

Sahlins distinguishes two cases.

Newspapers twist a study. His example: on July 29, 2011, the Glasgow Herald ran the headline "Immigrants Halt Neanderthal Era." The occasion, according to Sahlins, was a highly technical study by Cambridge archaeologist Paul Mellars about a notable increase in population size in the Upper Palaeolithic. Sahlins writes that the news retelling tweaked the scientific finding to fit the anxieties of its time.

The time influences science itself. Here his examples are the rise of the disease explanation after COVID-19 and of the climate explanation against the background of talk about climate. About the idea of Neanderthal conservatism, Sahlins writes more harshly. He links the high value placed on "innovation" to the ideology of modern capitalism. And he traces the very idea of Neanderthals "set in their ways" to 19th-century judgments, when British scholars, among them archaeologist Augustus Pitt Rivers and anthropologist Edward Tylor, called "primitive" peoples stubbornly conservative.

This is his interpretation. The fact that an explanation appeared at a convenient time does not mean it is wrong: the disease explanation relies on genetic data, the climate one on dating and ice cores. What Sahlins shows is something else: which question scientists ask and which answer makes it into headlines depends on what society is preoccupied with.

How to read news about ancient people

This is my advice, not Sahlins' conclusions.

  1. Tell the headline apart from the study. The Glasgow Herald example shows how a study of population growth turns into a headline about migrants. Before retelling such news, find out what exactly the authors measured.
  2. Check whether it is data or an explanation. "A virus was found in an ancient genome" and "the Neanderthals died out from disease" are different claims. The first may be a measurement, the second a hypothesis that it supports or does not.
  3. Ask whether the explanation accounts for what others do not. Sahlins himself points to the question for the climate explanation: why did our species survive the same conditions. A good hypothesis should answer such a question.
  4. Keep the genre in mind. A book excerpt, a scientific paper and a news story about it are three different levels of trust. I looked at how a scientific paper differs from a retelling using the example of Neanderthal birch tar.

When this does not concern you

If you want an answer to what exactly killed off the Neanderthals, this excerpt does not give one: it is about how we argue over the answer. There is no new data in it.

Summary

In his book "Neanderthals Among Us," Peter Sahlins shows that explanations of the Neanderthals' disappearance, from disease to climate to "conservatism," appear and gain weight along with the anxieties of their time, and that newspapers sometimes turn a scientific study into a headline about the issue of the day. This is a historian's opinion, not a new study, and it does not follow from it that any of the explanations is wrong. But it is a good reminder: when reading about ancient people, it is worth separating measurement from hypothesis, and hypothesis from headline.

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