Limits of science

Science is rational in the long run, but in the short run it always reflects the society it comes from. This article on the Neanderthal extinction shows that in spades, posing all sorts of current concerns that have been proffered as explanation for that extinction:

• Gender roles (women in combat?)
  
• Genocide (given our depredations of other primates, this would be my guess)
  
• Climate change (a too fashionable hypothesis these days)
  
• The superiority of Homo sapiens (never heard that one before)
• An epidemic in a small population
  

Most of these may have had a partial effect on the extinction. That's the way of real events. The idea of a normal accident, where no one cause is enough but where a snowballing sequence dooms the victim, is useful here, too. For example, if the balsam forest dies out in the Southern Appalachians, did the balsam woolly adelgid cause it? Global warming? Acid rain? Evolution into too narrow a niche?

You usually can't pick just one.