Between forty and fifty thousand years ago, during the first half of the final glaciation, there was a sudden change in this situation. Sudden at least in the terms of the coarse net cast by our prehistory which still lets millenia slip back into the sea of time. It was a change that must have taken much longer than the time which has passed since the first glimmers of civilization, yet it was swift in terms of what had gone before. Throughout the whole of their range in Africa and Eurasia the Neanderthal species disappeared. The survival of remnants of Palaeoanthropic type in Africa has been recorded (p.48), and there is every likelihood that comparable human relics will be forthcoming from Asia. In general, however, it can be said that, starting with Europe and west Asia, the entire Old World was emptied of all other groups and Homo sapiens left in possession. By what means the Palaeoanthropic men in all their variety were liquidated can never be known. It is easy, and doubtless partially true, to say that they were defeated by the superior intelligence, better weapons and organization of our own species. Yet sometimes, when thinking of the vast stretches of the earth's crust involved, and the many remote, unwanted corners where they could have survived, one feels that there is more of the Zeitgeist in it than this. As with the dinosaurs, so with these men, was there not something more than the environment and their enemies against them? Furthermore, while all proper weight has by now been given to the recent tendency to separate physical type and culture in the Palaeolithic age and to emphasize the variability of our ancestors, the impossibility of isolating a pure Homo sapiens stock far back into the Pleistocene, yet surely this final scene says something for the opposite point of view? In Europe, at least the picture is fairly clear. An apelike breed in possession of one well-defined cultural tradition was directly confronted and dispossessed by men of modern type and with a totally different material culture. Two breeds, we think two species, met face to face and their faces were strikingly unalike. However much mixed cultural and physical traits had been in the past, in the early Upper Pleistocene there was some centre of centres where men entirely of our own kind had created the beginning of the high hunting cultures of the Upper Palaeolithic a tradition almost wholly new, remarkable inventive, and, as history was to prove, immensely potent for future growth. Hawkes 1963:80-81
"There are two other sites evidently of great importance for the tracing down of farming origins. They are the Belt and Hotu caves, lying close together above the southern shores of the Caspian Sea. In the Belt Cave purely Mesolithic occupation was succeeded by a Neolithic one that contains some of the oldest dated remains of domesticated animals, perhaps about the beginning of the sixth millennium B.C. Yet here there is no clear
continuity between the two; the Neolithic culture cannot be said to derive from the Mesolithic.