One sign of a really cold day is the sharp sting of freezing air in your nose. It was believed that the noses of Neanderthals were better adapted to breathing the cold air of the Ice Age and that when the climate became warmer they were outcompeted by modern humans. This is now being questioned.
The opening in the Neanderthal skull is bigger than ours, with a larger nasal cavity behind it. This was thought to have bony convolutions to warm and moisten the incoming air, similar to those seen on some arctic mammals. These delicate structures would only survive in an exceptionally well-preserved skull though, so it was never clear whether they were actually present.
A recent nasal endoscopy of the skull of Altamura Man – the remains of whom are fixed in place in the wall in the Lamalunga cave in southern Italy owing totheir fragility – found no such structures. The investigating team from the University of Perugia concluded that Neanderthal noses were not as adapted to the cold as expected.
This may cause researchers to consider other theories about Neanderthal cold adaptation, such as whether they really had a more active metabolism. But if Neanderthal noses were not made for the cold, and if they were as well adapted to the warming post-ice-age world as us, why did they become extinct?
