Homo sapiens meet the Neanderthal in Europe

Conference

Published on

12 June 2015

Updated on

13 June 2017

Colloquia

The archaeology of Migrations

International colloquium organized by Inrap, in partnership with the National Museum of Immigration History.
November 12 and 13, 2015 at the National Museum of Immigration History.

Archaeology of Migrations
by Jean-Jacques Hublin, Professor and Director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (Germany)

Between 50,000 and 40,000 BP, Western Eurasia witnessed the expansion out of Africa and the arrival of Homo sapiens, anatomically similar to today's humans. This period also corresponds to the transition between the Middle Palaeolithic and the Upper Palaeolithic. In due course, the Neanderthals, who were settled throughout these regions, were almost entirely replaced. Our understanding of the exact chronology of this major episode in human evolution is still incomplete. It is particularly difficult to attribute the patchwork of Palaeolithic production which developed in Europe at this time to either one life form or the other. Yet it appears that this process, occurring at the scale of the whole continent, took many millennia. This overlapping period could have given rise to different types of interactions between Neanderthals and modern humans, both on a biological and cultural level.

Jean-Jacques Hublin began his career at the CNRS before becoming Professor of Anthropology at the Université Bordeaux 1. Since 2004, he is Professor and Director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (Germany), where he founded the Department of Human Evolution. He is Visiting Professor at the Collège de France since 2014. His research has mainly dealt with the emergence of Neanderthals and modern humans, and he is the father of the "Accretion Model" explaining Neanderthal origins. He is also interested in the interactions between Neanderthals and modern humans in Europe. He was a pioneer in the development of virtual palaeoanthropology and has led many field operations in Europe and North Africa. Jean-Jacques Hublin is President of the European Society for the Study of Human Evolution (ESHE), created in 2011.

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