Archeology and the dispersal of modern humans in Europe: Deconstructing the “Aurignacian”

Abstract

Few would now dispute the reality of a major dispersal of anatomically and genetically modern human populations across Europe and western Asia centered broadly within the period from ca. 45,000 to 35,000 BP in terms of conventional radiocarbon dating, or between ca. 47,000 and 41,000 BP in terms of the most recent calibration of the radiocarbon timescale.1 This can be supported equally from the direct skeletal evidence recovered from European and Near Eastern sites and from the closely similar conclusions drawn from studies of both the mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA evidence in modern European populations.2-4 How far these new anatomically and genetically modern populations may or may not have interbred with the preceding Neanderthal populations in the different regions of Europe remains a matter of lively debate.2, 5, 6 But the reality of this modern human population dispersal itself is now almost universally accepted.