ArticlePloS one2019
Inbreeding, Allee effects and stochasticity might be sufficient to account for Neanderthal extinction.
Article in PloS one, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Life on the edge: Mesolithic population size and viability on Malta.PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- Archaic humans in the Middle Palaeolithic Levant conducted planned and selective intercepts of aurochs, but not mass hunting.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- A simple analytical model for Neanderthal disappearance due to genetic dilution by recurrent small-scale immigrations of modern humans.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Pathways at the Iberian crossroads: Dynamic modeling of the middle-upper paleolithic transition.PloS one · 2025Article
- Neanderthal coexistence withScience advances · 2023Article
- Review
- Entropy and Cross-Level Orderliness in Light of the Interconnection between the Neural System and Consciousness.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
- Climatic windows for human migration out of Africa in the past 300,000 years.Nature communications · 2021Article
- An emerging consensus in palaeoanthropology: demography was the main factor responsible for the disappearance of Neanderthals.Scientific reports · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
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Abstract
The replacement of Neanderthals by Anatomically Modern Humans has typically been attributed to environmental pressure or a superiority of modern humans with respect to competition for resources. Here we present two independent models that suggest that no such heatedly debated factors might be needed to account for the demise of Neanderthals. Starting from the observation that Neanderthal populations already were small before the arrival of modern humans, the models implement three factors that conservation biology identifies as critical for a small population's persistence, namely inbreeding, Allee effects and stochasticity. Our results indicate that the disappearance of Neanderthals might have resided in the smallness of their population(s) alone: even if they had been identical to modern humans in their cognitive, social and cultural traits, and even in the absence of inter-specific competition, Neanderthals faced a considerable risk of extinction. Furthermore, we suggest that if modern humans contributed to the demise of Neanderthals, that contribution might have had nothing to do with resource competition, but rather with how the incoming populations geographically restructured the resident populations, in a way that reinforced Allee effects, and the effects of inbreeding and stochasticity.
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