Uppity Women: Scourge of Non-Humanoid Societies Too! Or, An Explanation Perpetually in Search of a Problem

Via, we learn that scientists are discovering new things about Neanderthals.

In addition to immense noses, elongated skulls, and barrel chests, some Neanderthals boasted flaming red hair, according to an international research team led by Harvard's Holger Roempler. . . .

Neanderthals possessed a gene known to underlie speech. The presence of the FOXP2 gene in two skeletons uncovered in the El Sidron cave in northern Spain suggests Neanderthals were capable of human-like language.

The range of Neanderthals was much greater than scientists had previously imagined, extending to the heart of Asia.

Fascinatingly, scientists are also working on mapping the entire genome of the Neanderthal from the fragment of a bone.

Oh, and there's one other little theory cited at the end of the article: a "husband-wife anthropological team has raised the possibility that female derring-do may have contributed to Neanderthals' demise." Did I mention the title of the article? "Stone Age Feminism? Females Joining Hunt May Explain Neanderthal's End" Hah hah! These articles reinforcing the Way Things Are Supposed To Be really do sell papers, don't they?

The University of Arizona's Steven L. Kuhn and Mary C. Stiner, use archeological evidence to argue that Neanderthal females - unlike Homo sapien women of the Upper Paleolithic period - joined men in hunts at a time when stabbing giant beasts with a sharpish stone affixed to a stick represented the cutting edge of technology.

That's courageous, but probably bad practice for a population that never numbered much more than 10,000 individuals. The loss of a few males to a flailing hoof or slashing antler is no big deal, in the long run. But losing females of child-bearing age could bring doom to a hard-pressed species.

"All elements of [Neanderthal] society appear to have been involved in the main subsistence pursuit" of hunting large animals, Kuhn said. "There's not much evidence of classic female roles.

"Putting the reproductive core of the population - pregnant women, mothers of infants, children themselves - at such danger could have put Neanderthals as a whole at serious demographic disadvantage," he said.

Not only would women suffer casualties, Kuhn said, their full participation in the hunt would mean they were not harvesting wild grains and other foods that could sustain their roving bands when game was scarce.

Human women, on the other hand, had the proper things down:

From early days, human women appear to have sewed hide clothing, tended fires, and gathered vegetables rather than risking their lives on the hunt.

And we know who lived to populate the planet, don't we?

Of course, there's certainly no scientific consensus on what eventually killed Neanderthals. They coexisted with humans for thousands of years, so it's unclear to me whether this female-hunting thing took that long to decimate the species or whether it is alleged to be a later-introduced social arrangement. It is known that

"Neanderthals were smart, sophisticated. They mastered fire. They made tools. But modern humans had selectively advantageous [genetic] traits that gave them an edge," said Richard G. Klein, a Stanford University paleoanthropologist. "Even tiny advantages in cognition, communication skills, and memory would have had huge downstream effects over time."

One scientist sums it up thusly:

"What finally happened could be really boring. Maybe Neanderthals ran out of reindeer to hunt. So they dwindled and died. . . ."

Sometimes it seems like journalists write this shit up with a wink just to tweak the ladies.