The “Paleo-Preeclampsia” Hypothesis: Did a Pregnancy Complication Kill the Neanderthals?
Did Preeclampsia kill the Neanderthalers?
A provocative new paper in the Journal of Reproductive Immunology (2026) suggests that the extinction of Neanderthals may have been accelerated by a lack of the “safety mechanism” that protects modern Homo sapiens from lethal preeclampsia. While both species shared the exceptionally deep, energy-demanding placentation required to grow large brains, the …
