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This dissertation seeks to reconstruct the distribution of Neanderthals and modern humans in time and geographic space in order to better understand the nature of interactions between the groups. Because human fossils from the Late Pleistocene are so rare, the biogeography of Neanderthals and moderns is primarily inferred from radiocarbon dates of archeological industries, which are assumed to have been made by one group or the other. Following this methodology, I critically reviewed published radiocarbon dates and produced new dates from active excavations in three regions: the Levant, Balkans, and Northeast Europe. The resulting regional chronologies were compared to the distributions of Neanderthals and moderns predicted from interaction models of no overlap, rapid replacement, and prolonged coexistence. The scenario of prolonged coexistence was subdivided into models of integration, displacement, and avoidance. Informative archaeological chronologies were produced for each region. In Northeast Europe, my new dates and site chronologies for Ciemna and Obłazowa Caves, Poland, suggest that the Middle Paleolithic ended before 45 kcalBP. In the greater region, a number of distinct assemblages appeared during Marine Isotope Stage 3 (MIS-3), but the duration and sequence of these industries is not well resolved due to the large uncertainties of the available chronometric dates. In the Levant, the dates and chronology reported here for Manot Cave, Israel, help to clarify the timing of Early Upper Paleolithic industries and test proposed migrations of modern humans between the Near East and Europe. Specifically, at Manot the Early Ahmarian industry was present by 46 kcalBP and the Levantine Aurignacian occurred between 37-35 kcalBP. However, it was the results from the Balkans that were most applicable to the interaction models proposed in this dissertation, and therefore most informative on the nature of Neanderthal-modern human interactions. The new dates from Pešturina, Hadži Prodanova, and Smolućka Caves, combined with published dates from other sites, suggest that Neanderthals and moderns overlapped for several thousand years in the Balkans. During this period of overlap the groups occupied distinct geographic zones, consistent with the models of prolonged coexistence by displacement or avoidance. The period of overlap ended by 39,000 calBP at the time of the Campanian Ignimbrite eruption and onset of the Heinrich Event 4 cold phase., Anthropology

The development of Neolithic in the South Caucasus remains a poorly understood phenomenon. The first agricultural communities have been identified at sites such as Aratashen and Aknashen. They are semi-sedentary group living in mud brick houses, with the earliest layers of these sites already showed fully domesticated species Conflicting hypotheses have suggested both a local independent agricultural development or a full population replacement by neighboring Near Eastern groups. Therefore, my project was dedicated to the identification of possible contacts between groups in this region and external groups, and how to characterize these interactions in order to understand how Neolithic came into being in the South Caucasus. The lithic model that I have developed focuses on the social aspect of technological practices. It assumes that stone tool production sequences are culturally specific, and that they may be shared in full only through complete access to the place of teaching, the enculturating environment. I have studied five lithic assemblages from four different sites were studied and compared. Two sites were “Mesolithic”, i.e., relying on hunter-gatherer modes of subsistence (Kmlo-2 and Bavra-Ablari), and two sites were Neolithic (Aknashen and Aratashen). Therefore, we were able to reconstruct this scenario, putting forth that the first contact between Near Eastern farmers and groups living in the South Caucasus may have taken place during the 9th millennium BCE. These contacts remained outside of the enculturating environment, but led to the diffusion of a very specific tool type known as the Kmlo, or Çayonu, tool. Early in the 6th millennium BCE, groups settled in the southwest Caspian belt moved within the South Caucasus, settling in the river valleys of the Kura and the Araxes. There, they interacted with existing Mesolithic communities following an open-static-parasitic frontier model involving unilateral movement of goods from the Neolithic to the Mesolithic groups. Such contact, taking place outside of the enculturating environment, was probably the result of transhumance of agricultural groups entering Mesolithic ecological niches. However, this did not lead to the adoption of agriculture by local groups, who were most likely pushed out of the areas in which they had previously lived., Anthropology