Neandertals, competition, and the origin of modern human behavior in the Levant

✍ Scribed by John J. Shea

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2003
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 358 KB
• Volume: 12
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1060-1538
• DOI: 10.1002/evan.10101

✦ Synopsis

Abstract

The East Mediterranean Levant is a small region, but its paleoanthropological record looms large in debates about the origin of modern humans and the fate of the Neandertals. For most of the twentieth century, the Levantine paleoanthropological record supported models of continuity and evolutionary transition between Neandertals and early modern humans. Recent advances in radiometric dating have challenged these models by reversing the chronological relationship between Levantine Neandertals and early modern humans. This revised chronostratigraphy for Levantine Middle Paleolithic human fossils raises interesting questions about the evolutionary relationship between Neandertals and early modern humans. A reconsideration of this relationship moves us closer to understanding the long delay between the origin of morphologically modern‐looking humans during the Middle Paleolithic (>130 Kyr) and the adaptive radiation of modern humans into Eurasia around the time of the transition from the Middle to Upper Paleolithic (50 to 30 Kyr).