Teeth and jaw are from 'earliest Europeans' (BBC)

[eppur_se_muova]

By Jonathan Amos
Science correspondent, BBC News

Worn ancient teeth and a jaw fragment unearthed in the UK and Italy have something revealing to say about how modern humans conquered the globe.

The finds in Kents Cavern, Devon, and Grotta del Cavallo, Apulia, have been confirmed as the earliest known remains of Homo sapiens in Europe.

Careful dating suggests they are more than 41,000 years old, and perhaps as much as 45,000 years old in the case of the Italian "baby teeth".

The details are in the journal Nature.

The results fit with stone tool discoveries that had suggested modern people were in Europe more than 40,000 years ago. Now, scientists have the direct physical remains of Homo sapiens to prove it.
***
more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15540464

[provis99]

1. I wonder what they were like,

before the Indo-European tribes moved in and exterminated them?

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. 'Exterminate'? There's no evidence for that

Genetic analysis shows that new groups (not just 'the Indo-Europeans') came into Europe at various times, but other groups, such as on the Atlantic coast (including the Basques, but also present elsewhere in Spain, Portugal, France, the UK and Ireland) still exist.

What make you think 'extermination' was involved?

[provis99]

4. there is genetic, language, burial, pottery, religious, and even climatic evidence.

I would hardly call that "no evidence".

This is one of the articles I've come across that summarizes the evidence pretty conclusively:
http://www.eupedia.com/europe/origins_haplogroups_europe.shtml

The Indo-Europeans pretty much exterminated the Neolithic settlers of Europe, who are mainly to be found among the Berbers of North Africa, their genetic kindred, today.

[14thColony]

5. 'Extermination' is (or was) often the go-to explanation when such changes occur rapidly

But one by one most of the 'invaders exterminated the indigenous population' explanations are coming apart at the seams, the most recent one to collapse under its own lack of evidence being the 'Anglo-Saxon Invasion' and subsequent 'extermination of the native Britons' -- two events that, if they happened, are unique for having left not the slightest trace in the archaeological or genetic record of Britain.

In the case of the Indo-Europeans we may have a half-wrong/half-right scenario: the evidence from archeology and genetics works just as well if significant numbers of agriculturalists, in possession of Jared Diamond's 'domestication toolkit' of grains, goats, sheep and pigs, and armed with bronze weapons and agricultural implements, infiltrate, settle, and expand further and further into Western Europe in the face of an aboriginal hunter-gatherer/pastoralist population. Since in general agrarian communities can support much higher population densities than hunter-gatherer communities, and increasingly numerous agrarians with bronze weapons can be more forceful in 'acquiring' the prime land they need for crops, it doesn't take long in historical terms before the aboriginal hunter-gatherers either a) adopt sedentary food production & advanced technology manufacture themselves, b) get assimilated via intermarriage with the more numerous intruders, or c) get pushed to the periphery, onto marginal agricultural land like, say, the Pyrenees. Of course d) there was probably the odd massacre here and there (probably in both directions), but I don't think the evidence supports it being the norm.

In fact, quoting from your own citation at Eupedia.com (which I've read before, and like):
"However, a massive migration and nearly complete annihilation of the Paleolithic population can hardly be envisaged. Western Europeans do look quite different in Ireland, Holland, Aquitaine or Portugal, despite being all regions where R1b is dominant. Autosomal DNA studies have confirmed that the Western European population is far from homogeneous. A lot of maternal lineages (mtDNA) also appear to be of Paleolithic origin (e.g. H1, H3, U5 or V) based on ancient DNA tests."

The high degree of variation in R1b, and the documented survival of Paleolithic mtDNA lineages in 'prime locations' in Europe (e.g., Cheddar Man) tend to argue for the aboriginal Europeans being assimilated instead of annihilated.

[Odin2005]

6. They did not "exterminate" them, they absorbed them.

Much like how the English are genetically descended from Celtics, but are culturally Germanic.

[xchrom]

2. recommend