With support from the University of Richmond

History News Network

History News Network puts current events into historical perspective. Subscribe to our newsletter for new perspectives on the ways history continues to resonate in the present. Explore our archive of thousands of original op-eds and curated stories from around the web. Join us to learn more about the past, now.

Life Span of Early Man Same as Neanderthals’

Longevity in early modern humans and in Neanderthals was about the same, according to a new study, suggesting that long life was not what helped the population of early modern humans increase.

Erik Trinkaus, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis and the study’s author, reported his findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“There must have been something else happening because the populations of early modern humans were expanding,” he said. “The last Neanderthal we know of lived about 40,000 years ago.”...
Read entire article at NYT