Neanderthals: they dispersed across Asia in 2000 years

When I look at the long distances covered by our ancestors across the Old World and the Americas, I often wonder how long did it take them to trek across the continents. Today I found a paper that modelled how long it took the Neanderthals to move from Western Europe, in the Caucasus, to Altai.

I was surprised to find that it could have taken around 2,000 years.

The paper by Coco E, and Iovita R (2025) (Agent-based simulations reveal the possibility of multiple rapid northern routes for the second Neanderthal dispersal from Western to Eastern Eurasia. PLoS One 20(6): e0325693. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0325693) used a computer simulation to find out how a group of hunter-gatherers would move from a starting point into new territories without any previous knowledge of what lies ahead. The program places "cost barriers" like deserts, glaciers, wider rivers, that slow down progress and require detours or more effort to cross them. The simulation did not consider sites where Neanderthal remains have been found, yet the routes it traced coincide with many of them!. Below is a map from this paper (Fig. 2) of these paths during different periods. The authors consider that advancing and retreating ice shields during glacial periods pushed the Neanderthals into refugia further south, to warmer climates, and that they pushed north during the warmer periods.

The simulations end at Altai, where we know that Denisovans and Neanderthals mixed.

How long did it take?

The paper states that "it is possible that Neanderthal dispersals would have taken slightly longer than 2000 years. However, the model still suggests dispersal could have occurred relatively quickly. Such a dispersal may have left few vestiges along the route, as Neanderthals would have spent relatively little time in any one location."

The authors find that their arrival to Altai was inevitable, forged by the geographic constraints and landscape: "This suggests that Neanderthal dispersal to the Altai is an inevitable outcome of local movement decisions defined by geography."

Further research would be required, in Afghanistan and Turkmenistan to locate sites and provide additional data. The paper did not model beyond Altai. I wonder what direction would the simulation take into China, or even towards the northeast, into the tip of Asia and across Bering, into America.<7p>

Could these same paths have been used by the H. Georgicus of Dmanisi, Georgia, in the Caucasus, ~2 million years ago, to reach East Asia?

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

Petralona: Neanderthals and Homo heidelbergensis coexisted 300 ky ago

The famous skull found in Petralona, close to Thessaloniki, Greece in a cave now known as "the Mausoleum", back in 1960. It was encrusted and cemented to the cave's wall with calcite, a mineral that precipitates from mineral-rich water in caves; it is known for shaping stalactites and stalagmites. Its age was unknown. But it was dated by C. Falguerès et al., (2025) who published a paper on it last September.

The paper reports how the team managed to date the skull: "the Petralona cranium has a minimum age of 286 ± 9 ka." This research also places it in our ancestral tree: "From a morphological point of view, the Petralona hominin forms part of a distinct and more primitive group than Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, and the new age estimate provides further support for the coexistence of this population alongside the evolving Neanderthal lineage in the later Middle Pleistocene of Europe."

The skull belongs to a more primitive group of hominins, older than Neanderthals and our species. The age of the sample shows that it coexisted with Neanderthals in Europe, alongside Neanderthals well into the Mid Pleistocene Period.

Petralona Skull.

This finding is important because it shows that human evolution is more complex than imagined. There were different kinds of of humans alive, coexisting, across the globe 300 ky ago: Denisovans, Anatomically Modern Humans, Neanderthals, and now, Homo heidelbergensis, and probably more. They surely met, exchanged sex, and know-how, shaping our evolution.

Linear trees with a single Neanderthal - Human split in Africa 600 ky ago, and simple models with unique, singular admixture events as proposed by certain models don't seem to accurately reflect the population dynamics that was going on in the Old World (and who knows, perhaps also in America), 300,000 years ago.

In a future post we will look into the validity of these trees and their shortcomings according to statistician and geneticist Alan R. Templeton.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

The windows for human arrival in America

Marine isotope stages (MIS) are periods that alternate hotter and colder climate. They have been identified by measuring the content of oxygen isotope ¹⁸O in ice cores.

They are numbered, and the MIS with even numbers represent glacial periods (and therefore lower sea levels as the ice packs have taken water out of the oceans), and the odd numbered stages represent warm interglacial periods (like the current one), with higher sea levels.

So for humans to cross Beringia and reach America, they'd have to do so during a cold even numbered MIS.

This is the list of cold MIS during the past million years:

• MIS 2 – 29 ky
• MIS 4 – 71 ky
• MIS 6 – 191 ky
• MIS 8 – 300 ky
• MIS 10 – 374 ky
• MIS 12 – 478 ky
• MIS 14 – 563 ky
• MIS 16 – 676 ky
• MIS 18 – 761 ky
• MIS 20 – 814 ky

So why did our human ancestors cross during the last possible stage? Why didn't Neanderthals do so during MIS 10? or Homo erectus during MIS 2O?

The following map, adapted from Nature shows that there were humans in Asia that could have crossed into America from MIS 8 onwards, and this does not contemplate H. erectus.

Potential migrants from Asia range: 152-300 kyr.

They lived in temperate to cold locations, why not follow the megafauna into Siberia and North America?

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2021 by Austin Whittall © 

Neanderthals in China some 40kya

This is a very short post, but quite interesting even though the paper it mentions was published over 18 months ago. It mentions Moutserian tools -typical of Neanderthals- in China.

The easternmost Middle Paleolithic (Mousterian) from Jinsitai Cave, North China, Feng Li et al., Journal of Human Evolution, Volume 114, January 2018, Pages 76-84, Volume 114, January 2018, Pages 76-84

Their abstract is revealing:

"Abstract
The dispersal of Neanderthals and their genetic and cultural interactions with anatomically modern humans and other hominin populations in Eurasia are critical issues in human evolution research.
Neither Neanderthal fossils nor typical Mousterian assemblages have been reported in East Asia to date. Here we report on artifact assemblages comparable to western Eurasian Middle Paleolithic (Mousterian) at Jinsitai, a cave site in North China.
The lithic industry at Jinsitai appeared at least 47–42 ka and persisted until around 40–37 ka.
These findings expand the geographic range of the Mousterian-like industries at least 2000 km further to the east than what has been previously recognized.
This discovery supplies a missing part of the picture of Middle Paleolithic distribution in Eurasia and also demonstrates the makers' capacity to adapt to diverse geographic regions and habitats of Eurasia."

We add the map published in the paper:

JST -red arrow- marks the site. From Feng Li et al.

This means that the map we published in our post Neanderthals migration to America - Part I has to be modified with this new information!:

Neanderthal range in Asia, revised again. And possible dispersal route into America. ©. 2019 A. Whittall.

I have added the Denisovans and extended Neanderthal's range to include the Jinsitai cave in China.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2019 by Austin Whittall ©