Neanderthals

I resemble that remark!

We always suspected this about you, cj. But thanx for the graphic evidence.

Care for a game of tennis?

BTW....

Neither the Irish nor anybody else alive today is related to neanderthals in any way, shape, or manner whatsoever. If the Irish are messed up, it's for other reasons.

That's quite simple: no-one from Neanderthal immigrated to Ireland.

(But they could have done so: the railway station in Neanderthal opened in 1879 ....)

Some days it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps.

Ok - the evidence seems to suggest that the Neanderthal 'homelands' disappeared and their last outpost was Gibralter. This would indicate that the climate in Europe became too hostile for even a very well adapted hominid - talking Ice Age here folks.

If they had attempted to break out via the Middle East (an area that they shared with Modern Homo) they would have found that those areas were already occupied and the hunting strategies they successfully used in Middle Europe would not work there. With walls of ice pushing in from the North, the Eastern areas denied to them, no ability to take up a Mediterranean strategy in the South, it is obvious that the last place they could practice being Neanderthalish would be the last part of Europe available to them. Kinda sad, however there would have been no way of splitting the planet between one advanced human and another.

And no, Oireland would NOT have been a possibility.

To be sure, to be sure.....

I am not sure I understand this. I thought the Neanderthal was adapted to the Ice Age, and lost out to Cro-Magnon when the Ice Age receded and Cro-Magnon moved up from Africa.

Half the picture. The Pleistocene is the period of time that encompasses the rise and spread of modern homo. It is one characterised by repeated glacial 'events' where around 30% of the landmass of the world was covered in ice. The fall-out of this is two-fold:
1. The ice was created and held by a severe reduction in rainfall - water was effectively held in 'ice-storage'
2. The areas not in the cold-freeze were opened up in the tropics - perfect for the variety of human we are, but deadly for H. Neanderthalis.

Our species is a creature of the hot areas, the first 'beach-combers' landed in Australia way before the colonisation of Asia or the Americas. Europe was the last continent to be colonised by modern homo, even though it is one o f the closest to Africa. We wandered out of Africa with a predisposition to hot climates and the Ice-Ages opened up more and more of those tropical climes as the water receded and covered the areas that Neanderthals preferred.

This would effectively split the Alps into two zones with modern Northern Italy as the divide. As I pointed out - to move away from the 'homelands' to the East would involve competing with other humans. The move to the West (Gibralter) buys time, but leaves them so isolated that they are locked into a dead end.

Well, why the hell didn't they just cross the Atlantic? Lazy cave men...