Ancient DNA Reveals Why Neanderthals Were Already Dying скачать в хорошем качестве

Ancient DNA Reveals Why Neanderthals Were Already Dying

For more than a century, scientists have argued over what caused the extinction of the Neanderthals. Climate change. Competition with modern humans. Violence. Disease. Each explanation offered part of the story — but none could fully explain how a population that survived for over 300,000 years vanished so quickly. Ancient DNA has now changed that picture completely. High-resolution Neanderthal genomes recovered from caves across Europe and western Asia reveal something far more decisive than a single catastrophe. Long stretches of identical DNA, extremely low effective population sizes, and repeated signs of close inbreeding show that Neanderthal populations had been small, fragmented, and biologically fragile for tens of thousands of years before modern humans ever arrived. This genetic evidence tells a quiet but devastating story. Neanderthals were not wiped out in a sudden collapse or defeated in a direct conflict. They were already declining — isolated into small groups, accumulating harmful mutations, and living dangerously close to demographic failure. When modern humans expanded into the same regions with larger, interconnected populations and wider social networks, the outcome became mathematically inevitable. No invasion was required. No massacre appears in the DNA. Just probability, played out over millennia. In this video, we examine the genetic data from multiple Neanderthal sites, explain what runs of homozygosity and effective population size really mean, and show why ancient DNA reveals extinction as a slow, unavoidable process rather than a dramatic event. Sources & further reading: – Prüfer et al., Nature (2017) – High-coverage Neanderthal genomes – Mafessoni et al., Science (2020) – Neanderthal population structure – Villanea & Schraiber, Genetics (2019) – Neanderthal effective population size – Hajdinjak et al., Nature (2018) – Neanderthal–modern human admixture This is Hidden Strata — where modern science rewrites what we thought we knew about the deep past. #neanderthaldna #ancientdna #humanevolution #archaeology #prehistory