This changes things.
The old story was that modern humans, when they came out of Africa wiped out the inferior Neanderthals in Europe. But the old story has been changing. First, it turns out that humans made love, not war. I'm carrying 2.6% Neanderthal DNA.
But above is a picture of very old modern human teeth... in China. How old? Read the article, but apparently modern humans were in China something like over a hundred thousand years ago, and a lot longer than when they finally colonized Europe.
China is a lot farther from Africa than Europe. The new theory is that when modern humans came out of Africa and into the Middle East they found it easier to head east across the Himalayas than mess with the Neanderthals in Europe. It wasn't until around 45,000 years ago that modern humans started appearing in Europe.
Were Neanderthals so tough or clever as to keep moderns out of their territory? Perhaps they were just entrenched enough in their niche to make it just a lot more difficult for moderns to move in. What we do know is that there was a lot of ice and snow. Glaciers were sliding back and forth across Europe and there was a bad stretch of volcanic activity not long before the moderns showed up in Europe. So maybe the changing climates and volcanic activity wiped out a lot of the Neanderthals, allowing moderns to move in and absorb the remainder of the Neanderthals.
All this will be clarified or disproven with the discoveries to come.
