Thinking about Neanderthals part II : What if one population is more efficient at mobilizing carrying capacity?

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a simulation tool for thinking about environmental change and population competition and replacement, along with some results that built on recent work on Neanderthals by Timmerman and a few others. The basic conclusion was that a population is more likely to replace a competing population that has a…

Cerutti Mastodon 2020: Interesting new results, more experiments needed

Bordes et al. (2020) bring us an interesting and methodologically strong update on the Cerutti Mastodon site, which has been claimed (Holen et al. 2017) to show 130 000 year old archaeological material in Southern California. If confirmed as archaeological, the Cerutti Mastodon site would push back the earliest material remains of human activity in…

Thinking about Neanderthals: A simple simulation tool to explore population competition and replacement

Three recent papers consider the role of climate change in Neanderthal replacement. Timmerman (2020), on the basis of recent simulation experiments, suggests that Homo sapiens must have been “considerably more effective in exploiting scarce glacial food resources as compared to Neanderthals.” Timmerman found that in simulation at least, Homo sapiens must be able to sustain…