It's so easy, the cave men did it? LiveScience.com staff writer, Dave Mosher, wrote an article on Yahoo.com titled "Climate Change, Not Humans, Trounced Neanderthals" about Francisco Jimenez-Espejo, a University of Granada paleoclimatologist who “says a lack of evidence has left climate change weakly supported—until now. 'We put data behind the theory,' he said, filling in a large gap in European climate records when Neanderthals faded out of existence.”

He concluded from a detailed examination of evidence that Neanderthals disappeared from Earth more than 20,000 years ago at least partially because of climate change. As in global cooling.

The media like to single out any variation in global temperature (and any significant weather event) as evidence of anthropogenic climate change (ACC) but do not like to report that we have had global climate change long before the evil humans began emitting carbon and Al Gore's assistant figured out how to work a Power Point presentation. This study just shows that Earth has had swings in temperature before, but reporting it that way would not follow the ACC script.

This is another analysis of physical data that confirms an extreme cold snap 20,000 years ago. Climate studies indicate that since then, Earth has been warming. That means that Earth's climate experienced temperature swings long before the advent of the internal combustion engine. Here's the explanation of how Jimenez-Espejo's group of scientists arrived at their conclusion (emphasis mine throughout):

To figure out the temperature, water supply, and windiness of Iberia from 20,000 to 40,000 years ago, the scientists looked at sediments on the ocean floor off Spain and Portugal. Because wind or water erode rocky minerals differently, the pebbles and fragments wash into the sea in different ratios, creating a steady track record of land conditions at the bottom of the ocean.

The scientists also focused on barite, a compound gathered by marine animals. The more barite in sediment, the more lively the oceans were at the time. “When we found big drops in marine productivity, we knew there were big changes in climatic condition in Iberia,” Jiménez-Espejo says.

The study reveals three rough climatic periods for Neanderthals, with the last and harshest period starting about 26,000 years ago. “The last event was very, very cold and dry,” Jiménez-Espejo says, “and other than 250,000 years ago, such a harsh climate was never reached before.”

This lends weight to the idea that we are now experiencing a natural interglacial warming trend after a period of global cooling. If we experienced one of Earth's coldest periods 20,000 years ago, then it only makes sense that the temperature has increased since, with a few variations, like the Little Ice Age.

Since the Earth began warming 20,000 years before the dreaded man began generating mass amounts of carbon and if Al Gore is to be believed, then unless cave men perfected jet travel and fired up coal-powered factories, this could part of a larger natural global climate trend. The media don't like to report that. Maybe it was all of that woolly mammoth flatulence.