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Troubling the Neandertals: A Reply to Langbroek's ‘The Trouble with Neandertals’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

João Zilhão  and
Erik Trinkaus
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Extract

We cannot but agree with the basic contentions of Langbroek's paper that 1) the replacement of Neandertals by early modern humans in Europe is best understood from a perspective of historical contingency and 2) that it must have had a lot to do with the ‘very dynamic spatio-temporal redrawings of the population maps of Europe during the Weichsel glacial’ against the background of ‘the emergence of increasing climatological instability during the later part of OIS 3, with significant fluctuations at relatively short timescales’. This is the kind of approach we have been advocating to effectively supersede the reductionist ‘superiority’ paradigm that has dominated the literature on Neandertal extinction for the last twenty years.

Type
Discussion
Information
Archaeological Dialogues , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , December 2001 , pp. 135 - 142
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2001

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