Chapter 12: The Madness Gene

In chapter twelve, Kolbert explains the extinction of the neanderthals and the factors that could’ve led up to it. The Neander Valley is in Germany and it is an attraction where visitors can see how the neanderthals lived.  Tools and bones have been discovered all across the Middle East and Europe. They lived through cold climates until their sudden extinction thirty thousand years ago. There were theories about why this happened such as climate change or disease. The author believes that humans were the cause of the demise of the neanderthals. She meets Svante Pääbo who studies ancient genetics. When the bones of the neanderthals were first discovered, they were disregarded because it was believed that they were just human bones. “The bones, they said, belonged to an ordinary person. One theory held that it was a cossack who had wandered into the region in the tumult following the Napoleonic Wars. The reason the bones looked odd- Neanderthal femurs are distinctly bowed-- was that the cossack had spent too long on his horse.” (241) This shows how Neanderthals and humans share a great amount of traits due to some shared genes. When humans encountered and bred with the neanderthals, they established a gene mixture continued to transform. This chapter connects to the theme, science is a process. As scientists continued to make observations about the differences in the bone structure of humans and neanderthals, it allowed them to understand how neanderthals evolved into modern humans.