Neanderthals in Southwest Asia
Although their arrival in Asia is not well-dated, early Neanderthals occupied the region apparently until about 100,000 years ago.
In their turn, starting around 80,000 years ago, Neanderthals seem to have returned and replaced Homo sapiens in Southwest Asia.
[1] In Southwest Asia Neanderthals have left well-preserved skeletal remains in present-day Palestine, Syria, and Iraq.
The oldest known hominin specimen from the Levant, and from all the Middle East, is the Zuttiyeh skull, found by Francis Turville-Petre near the Sea of Galilee in 1927.
[verification needed] Frumkin et al. (2011)[10] arrived at a similar conclusion of a hot and arid Levant[when?]
This is what Hallin et al. (2012)[11] concluded in their study of the δ13C and δ18O[Note 1] values of goat and gazelle enamel from Amud cave in Neanderthals layers dated to 70-53 ka (Glacial Period), after comparing them to values from Qafzeh cave in a modern human layer dated to 92 ka.
They found that at Amud, neither the goats nor the gazelle consumed arid-adapted C4 plants, indicating that the environment was not as dry as today.
They found the magnitude and pattern of δ18O values in gazelle and goat teeth enamel to indicate that, unlike today, rain fell throughout the year at Amud in the Neanderthal period.
Indeed, the variation in δ18O values in the oldest layers of the teeth, formed when the animal is only a few months old, suggested that goats and gazelles were born throughout the year, which today happens only in the Levant in wetter-than-normal conditions.
Belmaker et al. (2011)[16] compared the prevalence in caves of microfaunal bones brought back by Barn and Eagle owls, which are known to accumulate large quantities of rodent skeletons.
Shea (2008)[14] has argued that Neanderthals were climatically forced out of the region (as modern humans probably were about 75,000 years ago).
Belmaker et al. (2011)[16] have found that the proportions of microfaunal bones in the Levant between 70 and 55 kya seem stable, despite the fact that small fauna are sensitive to slight changes in temperature or humidity.
It is possible that climate change drove Neanderthals to extinction quickly some time after 55,000 BP, but Hallin et al. (2012)[11] found strong consistency through time in the δ13C and δ18O values in the teeth of both goats and gazelles, suggesting that the climate was stable in the Levant at this crucial period when Middle Palaeolithic technologies of Neanderthals and early modern humans were replaced by Upper Palaeolithic technology of later modern humans.
Henry et al. (2017)[18] found that in the Levant the site exploitation territory of Neanderthals was narrow, as they limited themselves to rugged woodlands, while modern humans of the Upper Palaeolithic would have been generalists with large exploitation territories in both the rugged woodlands and levelled steppe landscapes.
