The Invaders: How Humans and Their Dogs Drove Neanderthals to Extinction
Pat Shipman
Why did modern man survive, while Neanderthals - his evolutionary relatives, descendants of an older offshoot of Homo - died out? Anthropologist Pat Shipman defends the idea that we owe the success of our ancestors to our predatory nature. Drawing on a biological understanding of invasive species that outcompete competitors, Shipman traces the devastating impact of a growing population of modern humans on his fellows and ranks our branch of Homo Sapiens among the most pronounced carriers of such aggressive qualities. And Shipman considers ... a wolf to be a reliable assistant in the implementation of this expansion. According to Shipman's hypothesis, the union of two predators - a man and a wolf - allowed them to successfully hunt large mammals of the Ice Age, which gave them a decisive advantage over the Neanderthals, when climate change greatly complicated the life of both groups of the Nomo genus.
