Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology Jamie Hodgkins’ latest papers is now available online in the Journal of Human Evolution, “Climate-mediated shifts in Neanderthal subsistence behaviors at Pech de l'Azé IV and Roc de Marsal (Dordogne Valley, France).” Neanderthals are our closest fossil relatives, but they went extinct 40,000 years ago. One hypothesis is that their populations crashed during a series of rapid cold events at the end of the Ice Age. Hodgkins new paper suggests that Neanderthals living in southwestern France butchered animals more intensively during cold, harsh, glacial time periods, supporting the idea that cold climates caused nutritional stress, which may have contributed to their demise.
University of Colorado Denver