Yeh Thanks for resurrecting it. Also mousterian stone tools found on Crete, and near the arctic circle in the foothills of the Urals. It is beginning to seem that these folks traveled farther and had a broader diet then had been previously assumed. Recently a leg bone from spain circa 400kyrs ago has been shown to have denisovan mtDNA--- In Spain,,,, darned unexpected. The guys at Max Planck hope to have the nuclear sequence within a year. Meanwhile it seems that either we do not have a clear understanding of the family tree of neanderthals and denisovans, or the denisovans too were a broad ranging peoples---(or both? or more?) Currently, it seems that there were(at-least?) 3 races of neanderthals and that all modern (non subsaharan african) sapiens sapiens have the dna from the middle group of the caucasus mountains. This seems to indicate that as early sapiens sapiens migrated north, they did so walking. Another way of looking at the "neanderthal die-off" Is that what actually died off was the purebred homo-sapiens-sapiens who migrated out of africa. It seems that only the children of those who bred with neanderthals gained the immunity and vitamin d acquisition genes which allowed them to survive the pathogens and limited sun of the Eurasian biom. .......... gotta go remove a splinter from my beloved spouse's foot--a different sort of paladin "have tweezers will travel"
Chimpanzees didn't necessarily need rafts or to trek around headwaters. There are such a thing as droughts. There is such a thing as rivers changing their courses. The chimpanzee's spread around Africa was doubtlessly a gradual spread, but over many eons.
Interestingly, there seem to be 2 hotspots for denisovan dna in the highlands of northern south america. Perhaps coincidentally, there seem to be neanderthal dna hotspots nearby. By "hotspots" is meant that there is a higher percentage of the mentioned dna. More questions follow each new strand of knowledge.
