late pleistocene population interaction in western europe

physical anthropologists to adopt the Pre-sapiens hypothesis, as this cultural connection
meant to him that modern humans were already present in Western Europe before the
beginning of the Upper Paleolithic. The development of Peyrony’s and Bordes’ ideas is
summarized in Figure 1 and compared with the interpretations put forward by Breuil.
For more than five decades, the only significant modification to the partial
parallelism hypothesis of Peyrony was the suppression of the Middle Perigordian by
Sonneville-Bordes (1955, 1958). Indeed, Peyrony’s Perigordian II was found to be
Aurignacian and is now referred to as the Aurignacian 0 (on this issue, see Bordes 2000,
2002, 2003). In addition, the Perigordian III was shown to postdate the Perigordian V,
and, therefore, to be more recent than suggested by Peyrony (see discussion in Harrold
1981). Although Peyrony appeared to have change his opinion about some of these issues
in his last papers (Bordes 1984), Bordes adhered to the view that two modern human
phyla, a Perigordian and an Aurignacian ones, coexisted in the Early Upper Paleolithic of
France.
Following Breuil and Boule, Bordes (1972a:215) asserted, with little supporting
evidence, that the Aurignacian emerged in Western Asia or Eastern Europe from a non-
specialized form of Neandertal. In his view, the Aurignacians, the “oriental” modern
humans, migrated to France with a “well-developed culture” and replaced the
“occidental” modern humans associated with the MAT and the Châtelperronian (Bordes
1961:808). However, Bordes failed to locate the geographical source of this migration.
Aurignacians were believed to be immigrants because “in contrast to the Perigordians, it
does not seem possible to see the Aurignacians as natives” (Bordes and Labrot 1967:27,
translation by the author).
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