Hmm .. ye thinking about it, it is kinda strange. Dunno how long you need to roam around until you see some other tribe by chance. But certainly not thousands of years?

>What evidence do you suggest supports this for 50k years?

there is no evidence that they were near to each other for 50K years, only that their genomes diverged 50k years ago which was the last time they were near each other.

At the separate-times-and-places that they died in "France", the recent migrants may only have arrived in the last few months, having spent the previous 50K years over in that other far away place, and died only somewhat near each other a decade apart

the mixed genome of early modern humans and the lack of mixing of Neanderthals is a separate piece of evidence, and it may point to Neanderthals not being as sexy-social, but that's just a "may".

You don't really need slaves in a hunter and gatherer society (no agriculture, no construction, no mining = no backbreaking work that free people are loath to do), and you don't really have the institutions to keep them from running away.

As far as our observations of Stone Age people go, if they catch someone, they either kill them or make them a permanent member of the group.

Masters have bred with slaves since the beginning of history. Abraham and Hagar, for example.

I'm confused by this, humans already had well-developed and complex language well before we started moving out of Africa into Europe.

> a time when humans could barely speak with eachother.

That's a pretty wild claim

> That book is definitely incorrect

That's a rather bold claim about one of the world's foremost paleoanthropologists.

"When you are searching for ancient DNA [from 40,000 to 45,000 years ago] … all these early sapiens have recent Neanderthal DNA, and that's why we have [Neanderthal DNA] today. But when you reach and you try to extract DNA from the last Neanderthals, contemporaries of these early sapiens — let's say between 40,000 and 50,000 years ago — there's not a single Neanderthal with sapiens DNA." https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/simply-did-not-work-...

Source?

Yes, I think his research focuses on a more recent period, and one of the main points of the book is to refute theories about why Neanderthals became extinct, so the 250kya period wouldn't be directly relevant to that.

It's interesting that according to https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/humans-and-neanderth... "This group of humans died out".

I gave this an upvote, because it seems like a plausible scenario and I had the same question. I have to say though, it feels a little uncomfortable upvoting a comment about rape.

I think you’ve got your facts garbled, or the podcast has. Up to about 20% of Neanderthal DNA has survived somewhere dispersed among humans, but some countries and backgrounds have a maximum of 3% per human. The average is about 2% outside Africa.

If there's a ton of evidence for this, please provide some citations. I for one have never heard a single scientific claim for individual people having 20-30% Neanderthal DNA. As the sibling comment said, there may be that much Neanderthal DNA spread around in total, but no single individual sapiens has more than a tenth of that.