Around the World in 80 Days

Many books place their debut at about 120,000 years ago in the form of remains found at the Klasies River Mouth in South Africa, but not everyone accepts that these were fully modern people. Tattersall and Schwartz maintain that БЂњwhether any or all of them actually represent our species still awaits definitive clarification.БЂ«The first undisputed appearance of Homo sapiens is in the eastern Mediterranean, around modern-day Israel, where they begin to show up about 100,000 years ago-but even there they are described (by Trinkaus and Shipman) as БЂњodd, difficult-to-classify and poorly known.БЂ«Neandertals were already well established in the region and had a type of tool kit known as Mousterian, which the modern humans evidently found worthy enough to borrow. No Neandertal remains have ever been found in north Africa, but their tool kits turn up all over the place. Somebody must have taken them there: modern humans are the only candidate. It is also known that Neandertals and modern humans coexisted in some fashion for tens of thousands of years in the Middle East ...»