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In this episode, “Were Neandertals and Modern Humans Just Ships in the Night?”, Michael Balter (Science 9 May 2011) adds to the legends of the state of the, er, relationship between modern humans and Neanderthals:
Neandertals and modern humans were probably like passing strangers, Pinhasi says. “At this stage” of this ongoing research, he says, the results “do not support any major overlap between Neandertals and modern humans” much after 40,000 years ago, at which time Neandertals were probably going extinct. Pinhasi adds that “many of the very young dates, for example, from Gibraltar, are probably just wrong” due to contamination, mixing of archaeological layers, and other factors.Wil Roebroeks, an archaeologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands, applauds the results: “These dates … strongly suggest that the hypothesis of a suggested overlap of 10,000 years between Neandertals and modern humans is falsified.”
But biologist Clive Finlayson, director of the Gibraltar Museum and leader of Neandertal excavations at this British territory at the southern tip of Spain, says that the late dates of 32,000 years that he and his team have found for Neandertal occupations in Gibraltar’s caves—which are not based on direct dating of fossils—are not challenged by the new findings. “This paper is a typical example of the speculative extrapolation that … archaeologists and anthropologists often do,” Finlayson says. “It does not mean that Neandertals did not survive elsewhere, especially in southern refugia.”
But couldn’t they all be wrong? Next episode TBA