As written by David Perlman, Science Editor at the San Francisco Chronicle in Neanderthal in all of us, DNA study indicates:
"... Richard G. Klein, a noted archaeologist at Stanford who has long worked on the evolution of Neanderthals and humans, has serious reservations about the work. He is known for his research into the fossil record showing how modern humans replaced the Neanderthals throughout Europe thousands of years ago.One of the main problems that I have found in dealing with mainstream archaeology over the years in fact has been the archaeologists' hopeless reliance on their own home-spun theories, whatever their origin, regardless of the actual probative evidence.
The Pääbo group's report, he said, "contradicts everything we know about the archaeological record. Their evidence is really wobbly and it bothers me a lot. But it's very important stuff if it's right - and I really do hope it's right."
The Neandertal issue is only one very representative example of the absolute evidentiary follies which pervade mainstream archaeology, and which have in many areas of archaeological study become so entrenched that no voice of reason challenging those theories is heard.
Thankfully, genetic studies are changing and will continue to change many of the totally nonsensical notions published by archaeologists over the last centuries, decades and years.
There is no probative evidence in archaeology or elsewhere -- and there never has been such evidence -- that Neandertals died out as a separate species, to be replaced by modern man.
Rather, it is equally compelling to argue that Neandertal man in one way or another evolved into viz. merged into modern man, either by the path of evolution or by the path of interbreeding with another human primate form.
The details, of course, will remain a conundrum for many years to come, but we can at long last bury the useless theory that Neandertal man occupied all of Europe and western Asia, only to be fully replaced by newcomers from Africa. That theory was always based on sand.
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*** "Neanderthal" as used in many publications is -- pedantically seen -- simply a wrong English-language-based spelling of the Neandertal in Germany.