Thus, the chances of contact between the two species must have been very low. If we consider a habitable area greater than 10 million km², the population density was negligible, close to 0.103 people/100 km².Īdd to the low population density that the places of residence (caves, shelters or riverbeds) were repeatedly reused by the same groups over time. In other words, throughout central Europe the inhabitants of what today could be a small town were distributed. We lack reliable data for the Middle Palaeolithic, but we do have data for the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic (Aurignacian), when a population of between 900 and 3,800 people is estimated in Central Europe. It is not a mere figure, but rather it addresses the possibilities of encounter that could have occurred in the past between both communities. The population density in Eurasia, throughout the Late Pleistocene, about 129,000 years ago, must have been very small. New archaeological records and advances in understanding our genome have completely transformed the way we can now tell our story alongside Neanderthals. The defeat of the Neanderthals, the extinction of the last “sister” species, could have been due to climatic changes, perhaps to their own anatomical condition, even to the effects of an epidemic that decimated them.
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