68,000–20,000 BCE: (The Extinction of Archaic Hominins and the Question of How Encounters Proceeded — Middle Stone Age Hominins Unable to Compete Over the Lo…

68,000–20,000 BCE: (The Extinction of Archaic Hominins and the Question of How Encounters Proceeded — Middle Stone Age Hominins Unable to Compete Over the Long Run and Eventually Dying Out in the Face of Fully Modern Human Advance, Genetic Studies Revealing Small-Scale Admixture with Neanderthals and Denisovans Outside Africa and with Middle Stone Age Hominins Within Africa, the Open Question of Whether the Process Involved Only Resource Competition or Also Warfare and Violence): The possession of new kinds of technology had two further long-range consequences. Notably, the Middle Stone Age hominins of those ages were unable to compete over the long run, eventually dying out in the face of the advance of our fully modern ancestors into new lands. Genetic studies reveal, however, that there was admixture between our modern human ancestors who emigrated from Africa and other hominins in Europe and Asia, specifically the Neanderthals and Denisovans. A further, similarly very small amount of admixture with the Denisovan hominins took place among the ancestors of the earliest fully modern human settlers of Island South Asia, New Guinea, and Melanesia. Recent studies indicate that similarly small-scale interbreeding transpired also in Africa between Middle Stone Age hominins and those of our fully modern ancestors who expanded out of eastern Africa into other parts of the home continent. How did these encounters proceed? Was it simply the possession of the toolmaking and intellectual and language capacities that allowed fully modern humans to eventually outcompete those other hominins for subsistence resources? Or might there have been, as well, warfare and violent encounters over access to food sources? There remains much to be learned here. The admixture is the most human detail in the story. Even as fully modern humans were replacing archaic populations across the globe, they were also, at least occasionally, interbreeding with them. The replacement was not absolute. It was not instantaneous. And it was not entirely impersonal. Somewhere in the deep past, fully modern humans and Neanderthals and Denisovans met not only as competitors but as partners, however briefly, and the genetic traces of those encounters persist in the DNA of every non-African human alive today.