5/15/2023 0 Comments Hand of fate cave shelterIn 1987 the work of Cann and colleagues provided compelling mitochondrial evidence for a recent African origin of all modern humans. This view became widely accepted with advances in genetic studies and dating of fossils and sites in Africa, Europe and the Near East. The opposite view assumed a single origin of modern humans and replacement of archaic populations, including Neandertals, by modern humans immigrating from an unknown source area. Into the 1980’s many paleoanthropologists argued that the Neandertals had evolved into modern humans (or modern Europeans) and that the Upper Paleolithic derived from the Middle Paleolithic Neandertal culture. The study of this process of transition integrates data and scientists from a wide range of disciplines, including archaeologists, physical anthropologists, dating specialists, and increasingly so, geneticists. In western Eurasia, the process led to the replacement of an archaic population (Neandertals) with Middle Paleolithic technologies by a population of modern humans ( Homo sapiens) with Upper Paleolithic ones –. Their disappearance in the fossil record constitutes the biological part of a process of change that occurred in Europe and in the Near East between approximately 45 and 35 thousand years ago (ka) –. The demise of Neandertals is one of the most debated issues in paleoanthropology. Instead, current genetic data suggest that complex processes of interbreeding and assimilation may have been responsible for the disappearance of the specific Neandertal morphology from the fossil record. This systematic review of the archaeological records of Neandertals and their modern human contemporaries finds no support for such interpretations, as the Neandertal archaeological record is not different enough to explain the demise in terms of inferiority in archaeologically visible domains. Modern humans are usually seen as superior in a wide range of domains, including weaponry and subsistence strategies, which would have led to the demise of Neandertals. Having thrived in Eurasia for more than 300,000 years, Neandertals vanished from the record around 40,000 years ago, when modern humans entered Europe. Their distinct fossil remains have been retrieved from Portugal in the west to the Altai area in central Asia in the east and from below the waters of the North Sea in the north to a series of caves in Israel in the south. Neandertals are the best-studied of all extinct hominins, with a rich fossil record sampling hundreds of individuals, roughly dating from between 350,000 and 40,000 years ago.
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