My perfect cousin

Back to the blog after a Bank Holiday spent visiting family and I find that more distant relatives have been in the news. There's been a trend in more recent years to rehabilitate our evolutionary cousins the neanderthals from their original "nasty brutal and short" image, but the general assumption still seems to be that they died out and we survived because they were in some way inferior - maybe their brains, although on average bigger than ours, were less highly convoluted. Perhaps the anatomy of their vocal tract, not preserved directly, but inferred from their skeletal structure didn't permit the range of complex language sounds produced by Homo Sapiens. Whatever it was, we're here and they're not, ergo we were better in some significant way.

Interestingly the latest piece of research on the stone tools produced by the neanderthals and by humans just like us living at the same time, suggests that they may not have been out competed at all. Their stone technology, argue the authors, was every bit as good as ours, perhaps even a little better. Why, then, did they perish when we survived? The theory is that they just happened to be a small group of folk, living in the challenging, marginal environment of ice age Eurasia. The conditions were against their population expanding, whereas modern-type humans coming out of the tropics, lived in a more benign environment and were simply able to out breed them, even though they may technologically and intellectually have had the edge.

It's an intriguing theory. It may, of course be dead wrong, but it's not unusual to find that being in the right place at the right time can count for more than actually being better. We think of life and nature as a quest for perfection and our culture, from the Olympic Games to advertising encourages us to think that being the best is all that counts. But in real life, good enough and on time often beats a more efficient solution which can't be made to work, or doesn't have the right resources behind it. Think about the VHS v Betamax videotape format war, which many feel was won by the technically inferior product - or even the emd of the Second World War, when the Nazis' sophisticated rockets, jets and Tiger tanks counted for nothing against the allies' almost endless supply of workaday kit such as Sherman and T-34 tanks.

So, just maybe, we are actually the second-best species of humans on the planet - the really bright guys hung on until 25,000 years ago but got wiped out by the challenge of maintaining a viable population in an extreme and hostile environment. Unlike Kevin in the Undertones' famous song, our perfect cousins just didn't survive to prosper, be envied and, presumably, excel on University Challenge.