"Persistence of a (slightly) inferior competitor: Simulating spatial competition between neanderthals and anatomically modern humans. "

02/03/06: 10:30 AM, webcast
11th Floor Large Conference Room
Host: Patrick Pantel, schedule

Abstract: Fifty thousand years ago populations of archaic Homo sapiens, the best know examples of which are the neanderthals, occupied a geographic range stretching from the Iberian peninsula to East Asia. By 30,000 BP all of these archaic humans appear to have been replaced by anatomically modern humans, with little or no inter-population gene flow. This remarkable fact suggests that anatomically modern humans were universally better competitors and a majority of archaeologists would point to the emergence of a ‘modern human behavioral package’ as the source of this competitive advantage. Available archaeological evidence, however, is inconsistent with a strict conclusion that anatomically modern humans had a behaviorally-based competitive advantage over archaic human species. Over most of the geographic range involved archaic and modern H. sapiens were much more similar to one another behaviorally then they were different. Building on the spatially explicit competition models of Tilman (1994), the neutral models Hubbell (2001), and Levy dispersal models of Sole et al. (2005), this paper presents a series of continuous-space agent-based simulations exploring the relationships between the complexity of geographic arrangements of populations in space, competitive abilities and dispersal strategies. It is argued that if archaic H. sapiens enjoyed any form of incumbent advantage in holding a patch, then anatomically modern humans may have succeeded in replacing archaic populations by being gap specialists. References: Hubbell, S. P. 2001. The Unified Neutral Theory of Biodiversity and Biogeography. Princeton University Press, Princeton. Tilman, D. 1994. Competition And Biodiversity In Spatially Structured Habitats. Ecology 75(1):2-16. Sole, R. V., F. Bartumeus and J. G. P. Gamarra. 2005. Gap percolation in rainforests. Oikos 110(1):177-185.

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Last updated: Mon Jun 19 17:44:06 2006