late pleistocene population interaction in western europe

scholars like Schaaffhausen, Broca, de Quatrefages, Huxley, and Dubois, biological
anthropology developed as a discipline to make sense of these skeletal remains by
specifying their affinities with living humans.
Small sample size and uncertainties in chronological attribution restricted the
reach of early interpretations about the evolution of modern humans. At the beginning of
the twentieth century, after several decades of excavations, the number of human remains
attributed with any degree of certainty to the Paleolithic was very small and the
chronology of several important technocomplexes was still extremely sketchy.
Some of these early finds are especially noteworthy. In 1908 and 1909, the
discovery of several Neandertal burials associated with Mousterian artifacts at Le
Moustier, La Ferrassie, La Chapelle-aux-Saints, and, a few years later, at La Quina,
secured the status of the Neandertals as a past hominid population (Boule 1923). These
were not the first Neandertals found, however, given that remains of this taxon were
previously noted at Engis (1828), Gibraltar (1848), La Naulette (1866), Spy (1886),
Krapina (1899-1905), and more importantly, at Feldhofer Cave (1856) in the Neander
valley (Boule 1923; Smith 1982). The skeletal remains found at Feldhofer Cave are of
paramount importance, as these established for the first time that an archaic form of
hominid, presented as a “missing link” between humans and primates, existed in the past
(e.g., Huxley 1863).
The uncovering, in 1868, of several burials by road workers at a locality known as
“Cro-Magnon” has also been of great importance, as it projected the ancestry of living
humans into a relatively far past. Louis Lartet (1868), not to be confused with his father
Edouard, demonstrated that the Cro-Magnon remains were Paleolithic in age. Sonneville-
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