Division of Labor and Anatomical Differences

What did AMH have that Neanderthals lacked? Could these characteristics help explain why AMH did so well, while Neanderthals died out?

In this post, I will address two less prominent hypotheses on Neanderthal extinction that attempt to answer these questions. 

In this paper, Steven Kuhn and Mary Steiner suggest that a gendered division of labor was a key component of AMH success. According to them, this behavior appeared for the first time in Eurasian cultures of the Upper Paleolithic. 

Neanderthal economies focused primarily on hunting large mammals; periods of relative food abundance would necessarily be accompanied by periods of relative food penuries, leaving little opportunity for Neanderthal populations to grow very much in the long term. 

AMH, on the other hand, broadened their diet to include smaller prey and plants. People no longer needed to engage in cooperative hunting: they were more free to engage in solo and scattered searches for food. Alongside these new behaviors, the authors argue that AMH began to divide labor according to age and sex. 

https://sausociology.wordpress.com/page/3/

In this paper, Karen Streudel-Numbers, Timothy Weaver and Cara Wall-Scheffler show that AMH's longer legs would have enabled them to run more efficiently than Neanderthals, thus allowing the former to conserve energy. The authors suggest that more efficient locomotion might have contributed to AMH success. 

Similar conclusions are reached by J.D. Polk in this paper. He too notes that Neanderthals and AMH had different body masses and limb proportions. His study "demontrat[ed] that primates with relatively long limbs achieve higher walking speeds while using lower stride frequencies and lower angular excursions than shorter-limbed monkeys, and these kinematic differences may allow longer-limbed taxa to locomote more efficiently than shorter-limed species of similar mass". The following clip provides an example of short limb walking--doesn't seems all that efficient... 

Walt Disney. "Uncle Waldo" Aristocats. Youtube, LLC. 20 July 2007. Web 7 Nov. 2012. 

Bibliography 

• Kuhn, S.L., and M.C.  Stiner . "What's a Mother to do? The Division of Labor among Neanderthals and Modern Humans in Eurasia." Current Anthropology 47.6 (2006): 953-981.
• Polk , J.D. . "Influences of limb proportions and body size on locomotor kinematics in terrestrial primates and fossil hominins." Journal of Human Evolution 47.4 (2004): 237-252. 
• Streudel-Numbers, K.L. , T.D.  Weaver, and C.M.  Wall-Scheffler . "The evolution of human running: Effects of changes in lower-limb length on locomotor economy." Journal of Human Evolution 53.2 (2007): 191-196.