Did Homo sapiens outnumber Neanderthals 9 to 1?

03 Aug

That is what a recent paper suggests:


All this brings us to an obligated earlier reference:
Which was previously discussed by me here.

average: 4424 
(min.: 1738 – max.: 28,359)

And suggests the following geographical distribution:

Aurignacian population est. (Bocquet-Appel 2005)

Nine Sapiens for each Neanderthal (9:1)



Fig. 2A
Fig. 4

Is this for real?

Magdalenian harpoons


It could well be double too. Half a million hunter-gatherers roaming Europe upon the arrival of the first farmers? Does this make any sense? I’m not sure but it’s not totally impossible, specially if we consider that sea resources (seals, fish, mollusks and crustaceans, whales maybe) had become very important by then.

Update: comparing with the Aleuts


This is a quite sizable population for a relatively small and cold territory. I have calculated that the traditional Aleut territory has some 30,000 km², what is just 5.3% of the territory of modern France (552,000 km², excluding overseas dependencies) and just 0.3% of all Europe. Extrapolating only to “France”, we’d get some 500,000 people. Sure that “France” is not all coast, as the Aleut territory was but it’s neither so far North and cold (the Aleut lands’ climate and geography is more comparable to Norway in fact).



6 responses to “Did Homo sapiens outnumber Neanderthals 9 to 1?

  1. Joy

    August 3, 2011 at 9:08 am

    Lots to cover here.First of all, population sizes in the area could easily have been higher than the genetic estimates. The Aleut people of the Aleutian Islands of Alaska (completely hunter-gatherer) numbered circa 25,000 at the time of European contact. These folks were essentially still living an ice age lifestyle in the 18th century.The ratio of H.s/H.n in this paper rings true to me. H.n lived for circa 300,000 years in Europe with no major changes in megafauna. Yet when H.s shows up, H.n and the megafauna melt away.My latest hypothesis is that H.n was much more dependent on big game than H.s. When big game dropped below a certain density, H.n would die back to a sustainable level. Thus they stayed in balance with the megafauna for repeated glacial cycles.If H.s was better at exploiting a variety of food sources, for example by better fishing or more efficient taking of small game such as hares, or even pursuit of deer to exhaustion (something H.n sprinters were unlikely to be suited for) — then H.s could keep going even when the big game was rare. Yet H.s would still take big game whenever it was encountered. In this scenario, H.n fades away not so much from warfare, as from loss of their main food source. H.n would have suffered the same way the Plains nations of North America suffered from European hunting of bison.Just a thought.

  2. Maju

    August 3, 2011 at 10:08 am

    The Aleut people numbering 25,000 is a great reference, because their technology should have been similar (+/-) to that of Magdalenian and Epipaleolithic peoples of Europe, also with emphasis in sea resources. Their area was not too large either, and was quite to the North (comparable with at least North Sea Europe, rather than the FC region). Thanks. "Yet when H.s shows up, H.n and the megafauna melt away".But not so fast, right? Some megafauna (U. speleoarctos notably) did vanish with the arrival of H. sapiens but others did not. We have evidence of almost all megafauna (mammoth, bison, rhino, horse, auroch, brown bear, wolf…) up to the Magdalenian period. It is only with the end of the Ice Age when some of these animals suffer a lot, even up to extinction in some cases (mammoth notably)."… they stayed in balance with the megafauna for repeated glacial cycles".One and a half glacial cycle. Neanderthals as such are not much older than our own species, so they lived through the Riss and most of the Würm glacial periods. "H.n would have suffered the same way the Plains nations of North America suffered from European hunting of bison".I seriously doubt that any amount of Paleolithic humans could have any impact in the numbers of bison. I'm imagining huge packs such as the ones found in North America and of course I do not imagine any of the brutally destructive practices of industrial era white hunters in railroad payroll or anything like that. I think that the demise of Neanderthals, even if probably aided by climatic accidents (HE4 cold spell notably) was more of a matter of "who controls and exploits this nice territory: you or me?" And it was "me", i.e. our ancestors by maybe even direct armed conflict at times.

  3. Maju

    August 3, 2011 at 10:21 am

    The Aleuts' territory has some 30,000 km² of land, which is 5.3% of the territory of the French Republic (excluding overseas dependences). A linear ratio would yield 500,000 people for "France", making the figures I considered at the end of this entry (for all Europe) perfectly plausible and even shy and conservative in fact.

  4. Maju

    August 3, 2011 at 10:42 am


  5. Andrew Oh-Willeke

    August 8, 2011 at 5:46 pm

    I think you are underestimating the area of Aleut territory.Also, while the precise ratio suggested by the study may be in tension with genetic estimates of the size of the Neanderthal population (which, it is worth recalling, are from a very, very small sample of individuals and is likely to have meaningful hard to quantify systemic error given the dififculties involved in the ancient DNA recovery process), the bottom line conclusion – that early UP anatomically modern humans were much more common than Neanderthals given the archaeological evidence, whatever the precise ratio may have been, is well supported.Another point to keep in mind when reconciling the two is that the Neanderthal DNA indicates two or three subpopulations, and that archaeological evidence is not evenly distributed geographically. It is not implausible that the populations were closer to parity in some regions and widely unequal in others. (Probably closer to parity in the North and more unbalanced in the F-C area.)The hardest issue with the archaeological evidence is the extent to which preservation and recognition is a factor. Distinguishing MTA artifacts from background randomly broken rocks is non-trivial and requires a fair amount of skill relative to the skill needed to identify later technologies as something hominin made, the degregation of older artifact deposits is expected to be greater with time, and it is also entirely plausible that Neanderthals were less heavy tool users than archaic modern humans. Parsing out both (1) differential rates of artifact discovery due to identification and degredation over time factors, and (2) different rates of tool production per capita, makes it difficult to make inferences from the archaeology alone.However, to the extent that both roughly confirm each other, even if the error margins don't quite overlap, the findings that the populations were somewhere on that order of magnitude are more robust.

  6. Maju

    August 8, 2011 at 6:30 pm

    "I think you are underestimating the area of Aleut territory."The territory is almost exactly the Aleutians East Borough and the Aleutians East Census Area (plus lesser islands in Russian territory, which I ignored for simplicity). I simply added up the non-water area of these two Alaskan administrative divisions. With water are it'd be double, so I'm almost sure that they are counting parts of the sea, what is not really valid. "It is not implausible that the populations were closer to parity in some regions and widely unequal in others".Not implausible but not likely either. You'd have to demonstrate it by means of an archaeo-statistical study like the one done by Mellars and French. "Distinguishing MTA artifacts from background randomly broken rocks is non-trivial"…It doesn't matter because the paper only makes passing mention of MTA and what they really compare is Chatelperronian with Aurignacian, two early Upper Paleolithic techno-cultures with, seemingly, different authorship. "… it is also entirely plausible that Neanderthals were less heavy tool users than archaic modern humans".This is an interesting idea but it would only divide by two (or was it 1.8?) the stats. We may indeed want to fine tune some data and inferences but it's a task that I cannot perform: it would require another academic study by experts on the matter.


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