This means Neandertals were really modern humans, right?
This study should put an end to the “sudden mutation” model of modern human origins. There was not a single mutation that made the critical difference in the ancestry of today’s people. There was no cognitive Rubicon leading to modern human evolution. I would analogize the process as a slow-motion avalanche: at first a few small sands began to tumble, and then selection on a large number of genes became inevitable. FoxP2 is one of those genes, and as yet we don’t know whether it was near the beginning or near the end of the process. But it is clear that the process began before the Neandertals were gone. Some aspects of behavioral complexity did begin to evolve rapidly sometime after 70,000 years ago. This rapid evolution was multiregional in context — it was not limited to a single human population. In particular, it was not limited to Africans: the last Neandertals clearly manifested technological and behavioral strategies otherwise defined as “behaviorally modern” (d’Errico 2003).
