When Neanderthals and modern humans met

W Neanderthals and Modern Humans Met comprises 20 papers first presented in the context of a conference held in Tübingen in 2004 on the nature of the interactions between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons (i.e., Homo sapiens sapiens) during the interval commonly referred to as the Middle-Upper Paleolithic Transition. Edited by Nicholas Conard, this book constitutes a wide-ranging and eclectic (in the best sense of the term) compendium of studies representing where our understanding of the MiddleUpper Paleolithic transition stands at the close of the first decade of the 21st century. In that sense, the book’s goal to present how far studies of the interaction between Neanderthals and modern humans—at least presumably, as the fossil record is all too scant for this time period—have come since 1856 is met with great success. While the book’s overall production value is very high, it does contains a few typos and illustrations are of unequal quality across contributions. This does not, however, detract from the wealth of information it contains about the ‘transitional’ record of Eurasia, from the Iberian Peninsula to the Russian plains, and almost every point in between. As such, it is a must-have for the library of any researcher seriously engaged in ‘transition studies,’ as it provides not only abundant new data about the paleoanthropological record of this crucial time period, but also some new and very promising perspectives from which to approach what may seem to some to have become a threadbare issue. The volume opens with an introductory chapter by Conard who draws a provocative pan-Eurasian picture of how contacts between Neanderthals and modern humans—when and where they happened—likely unfolded, and of the various behavioral mechanisms which enabled modern humans to outcompete Neanderthals throughout their range. This is followed by a paper by Weniger who reviews broadly what the empirical record allows us to say about population dynamics across the transition and that it is important to base any interpretations first and foremost on those coarse-grained data rather than on preconceived notions of how Neanderthals must have disappeared. This theme is also touched upon by Haidle, albeit from a very different perspective—she argues that Neanderthals are consistently construed as the stereotypical “other” in most narratives of modern human origins and that, as in many works of fiction, prevalent scenarios about their interaction with modern humans reflect tacit preconceptions and the tendency of framing encounters in us-versus-them terms. The next two chapters are among the best contributions to the volume and are likely to become requisite reading for all paleoanthropologists. In Chapter 4, O’Connell uses four cases, drawn from ethnography and archaeology, of replacement of one forager group by another to derive test implications about what may have facilitated a replacement of Neanderthal by modern humans in the Paleolithic. Although not accounting for all of the nuances of the Early Upper Paleolithic record, this approach admirably highlights the proper referential basis on which we should be building models of Pleistocene hunter-gatherer interactions, as opposed to drawing from inappropriate analogies from European colonization of the Americas and Australia. In Chapter 5, Hovers presents a very thoughtful discussion of ecological theory to recast the parameters of Neanderthal-modern human interaction and suggests that, as congruent competitors, they likely coexisted in a state of dynamic equilibrium. This perspective has the advantage of accounting for the very similar archaeological signatures of the two groups of hominins over tens of millennia, a situation Hovers rightly emphasizes is quite distinct from that of Europe during the transition interval. In the next chapter, Bräuer presents a critical evaluation of claims about the possibility of a substantial genetic contribution of Neanderthals to the gene pool of early European modern humans. He concludes that the identification of Neanderthal features in Upper Paleolithic Homo sapiens is largely unconvincing, based as it is on misleading assessment of certain features and/or on using features which he considers problematic. He concludes that there was likely only a very modest amount of gene flow between the two groups. In Chapter 7, Hublin and Bailey seek to address much the same issue, but approach it from the opposite perspective, namely by looking for modern features in late Neanderthals remains. They conclude that, especially when features linked to strong genetic signals are given primacy, there is little convincing evidence for interbreeding or in situ evolution towards modern human morphology. The conclusions of these two studies stand in notable contrast to those of Trinkaus and colleagues (Chapter 9) who present new details about the context and morphology of the Peştera cu Oase early modern human remains. These authors conclude that the presence of archaic features in these specimens indicates phylogenetic affinities to some kind of archaic hominin group, likely Neanderthals. Bocherens and Drucker (Chapter 8) present new stable isotope evidence to address the question of Neanderthal and early modern human diet and its inferential link to potential dietary competition between the two groups. They complement their analyses of hominin dietary patterns by