At least where Neanderthals are concerned:
A new study in Heliyon suggests that Neanderthals survived at least 3,000 years longer in Spain than we thought:
The authors of the study, an international team from Portuguese, Spanish, Catalonian, German, Austrian and Italian research institutions, say their findings suggest that the process of modern human populations absorbing Neanderthal populations through interbreeding was not a regular, gradual wave-of-advance but a “stop-and-go, punctuated, geographically uneven history.”
Over more than ten years of fieldwork, the researchers excavated three new sites in southern Spain, where they discovered evidence of distinctly Neanderthal materials dating until 37,000 years ago.
“Technology from the Middle Paleolithic in Europe is exclusively associated with the Neanderthals,” said Dr. João Zilhão, from the University of Barcelona and lead author of the study. “In three new excavation sites, we found Neanderthal artefacts dated to thousands of years later than anywhere else in Western Europe. Even in the adjacent regions of northern Spain and southern France the latest Neanderthal sites are all significantly older.” More.
Paper. (public access)
But what does it mean to say that human evolution is uneven and punctuated? When we are talking about a mere three millennia, we are talking about typical human history – which is always uneven and punctuated.
See also: Neanderthal, 50 thousand years ago, survived into his forties with disability
Neanderthal Man: The long-lost relative turns up again, this time with documents