Why did the Neanderthals go extinct? The role of speleothems in answering this hot question

The Neanderthals, our closest relatives, died out around 40 thousands years ago (ka) after expanding for 350000 years across a wide region from Western Europe to Southern Siberia. Despite decades of research into cultural, demographic, and environmental factors, there is no leading theory about the triggers of the most important biocultural transition in human history. This is likely because the available data comes from a limited number of sites, mostly in Western and Central Europe, which were on the periphery of the Neanderthals’ range. To accurately reconstruct the processes that led to Neanderthal’s extinction, the scientific community needs new extensive data, ideally from the core regions where the last Neanderthals lived. The LAST NEANDERTHAL project has been financed in 2024 by the Erc-Synergy call, with the ambitious aim to definitely and comprehensively answer the question: why did the Neanderthals go extinct? Three PIs from Bologna, Siena and Haifa Universities will lead this gigantic project involving the multidisciplinary investigation of more than 50 study sites in the western-to-east transect from Italy to Kirghizstan. Reconstructing environmental and climate variations in the 60-20 ka period, and their integration with the novel archeological and cultural data, is key for the success of the project. Together with lake sediments, speleothems were selected as multi-proxy paleo-archives. Pisa University (Italy) is indeed a partner institution for the LAST NEANDERTHAL project, leading the speleothem-based paleoclimate research unit. Several samples from Italy, Greece and Georgia are currently under investigation. Future Analyses will target samples available from Croatia, Macedonia, Hungary and Kurdistan. However, new cave sampling is scheduled in Czech Republic, Slovenia, Romania, Montenegro, Albania, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kirghizstan. This poster will present the 6-years long action plan of the speleothem unit, with special focus on: 1) preliminary results on speleothems covering the 60-20 ka period; 2) future cave sampling campaign; 3) job opportunities; 4) potential collaborations.