Why Anatomically Modern People Did Not Disperse from Africa 100,000 Years Ago

Abstract

Two competing hypotheses continue to dominate specialist thinking on modern human origins. The first posits that modern people originated in Africa and spread from there to replace non-modern humans in Eurasia (Brauer and Rimbach 1990; Stringer and Gamble 1993). The second suggests that modern humans originated everywhere—in Africa, but also in Eurasia—where non-modern humans had lived before (Wolpoff et al. 1994; Wolpoff 1996). The controversy will be resolved only with additional fossils and many new, reliable dates, especially in Africa and east Asia. However, the case for replacement is very strong in Europe and west Asia, where relevant fossils and dates are most abundant. In both places, the last non-modern people were the well-known Neandertals, who evolved in Europe before 130,000 years ago (Stringer and Gamble 1993; Hublin 1996) and later spread to west Asia, perhaps at the beginning of the Last Glaciation, about 80,000 years ago (Tchernov 1992, 1994). In both places, fully modern humans were widespread by the 40,000 year limit of conventional radiocarbon dating. Almost everywhere, the Neandertals seem to have disappeared very quickly, perhaps in less than a millennium. Possible exceptions to this rule include western France, where modern humans and Neandertals may have coexisted from 40,000 to 34,000 years ago (Hublin et al. 1996) and southern Spain, where a Neandertal enclave may have survived until 30,000 years ago (Hublin et al. 1995). For those who favor the replacement hypothesis, a potential difficulty is to explain why anatomically modern or near-modern humans expanded to Eurasia only between 50,000 and 40,000 years ago, more than 50,000 years after they occupied Africa and its immediate southwest Asian margin (Israel) (Rightmire and Deacon 1991; Schwarcz 1994). The reason, however, is probably that early modern or near-modern Africans were not behaviorally modern. In every detectable archeological respect, they were in fact in-

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