Carbon 14 dating suggests Neanderthals died out 40 000 years ago

Science : By 40 000 BCE, anatomically modern humans had begun spreading from Africa into Europe and Western Asia, the habitat of their hominid rivals, the Neanderthals. For how long did the two coexist? To help answer that question, Ron Pinhasi and Thomas Higham of Oxford University in the UK and their collaborators applied the combination of a new sample extraction technique and accelerator mass spectrometry to Neanderthal skull fragments found in a cave in Russia’s Northern Caucasus region. The technique, which exploits the 5730-year half-life of carbon-14, put the age of the fragments at 39 700 ±1100 BP (years before present). Pinhasi and Higham then reanalyzed other Neanderthal bone samples, some of which had suggested that Neanderthals survived past 36 000 BP. When combined in a statistical model, the reanalyzed samples indicated that Neanderthals had become extinct throughout Western Eurasia by 40 000 BP. Pinhasi and Higham’s paper appears in the current issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.