| Abstract: |
Late Pleistocene Israel is the region in which issues of population mixture or competition at the time of the emergence of modern humans are most likely to be solved. For those who believe that modern humans first arose in Africa and subsequently spread throughout the world replacing archaic populations, the Levant would be the first region where such archaic populations were encountered. For those who regard the Levantine Neandertal populations as late eH migreH s from a glaciated and inhospitable Europe, the Levant is the place where it is most likely that Neandertals encountered other human populations. If ever there was a time and place where we can examine the question of whether European and African populations exchanged ideas and mates, or competed with each other without genetic exchanges, this is it! In this paper we test the null hypothesis of a single human species occupying the Levant at the onset of the Late Pleistocene. An inability to delineate two distinct groups among the Levantine hominids would support the null hypothesis, while a demonstration of the presence of two morphs would lead to its refutation. We use non-metric traits to examine the eight most complete adult Levantine human crania to try to refute the contention first proposed by McCown and Keith (1939. The Stone Age of Mount Carmel: the Fossil Human Remains from the Levalloiso-Mousterian, Vol. II. Clarendon Press, Oxford), that the Levant `Neandertalsa (Amud, Tabun) were the same species as the `early modern humansa (Qafzeh III, VI, IX
Skhul IV, V, IX). To test this hypothesis we use individual specimens as `operational taxonomic unitsa, and assess it using phylogenetic analysis as a heuristic clustering procedure. While our analyses produce many different trees, none of the most parsimonious ones reveal a separate Neandertal clade. Furthermore, we conducted a pairwise difference analysis of these data, which also failed to reveal a unique relationship between the Neandertal crania that would be expected if these hominids were a di!erent species from that represented by Qafzeh and Skhul. We acknowledge that the bases for refutation are necessary but not indispensably sufficient conditions, and yet nevertheless, our findings fail to refute the null hypothesis. Instead our results suggest that the traditional `Neandertala versus `modern humana groupings in the Levant may not be as distinct as often thought. This would imply that as populations left Africa, they interbred with the Late Pleistocene inhabitants of the Levant, and suggest that as different populations moved or expanded their range, subsequent human evolution be viewed as a consequence of the continued mixing of ideas and genes.
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