The Future of Germs: A Discussion with Jonathan Kennedy
New Books in Biology and Evolution
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The Evolution of Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals
For at least 500,000 years, Homo sapiens were living in Africa and Neanderthals were living in western Eurasia. They occupied a pretty large region all the way from kind of Gibraltar in the west to the Al-Tai mountains again in Siberia. But then maybe about 150,000 or 120,000 years ago, we have evidence that humans began to interact with Neanderthals. The most convincing explanation is infectious diseases. We retained certain gene variants because they gave us an advantage as we pushed out of tropical Africa into more temperate Eurasia where there was a different disease environment.
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