Four hundred thousand to two hundred thousand years ago, Homo erectus disappeared from the face of the earth and in his place was left archaic Homo sapiens, also known as Homo sapien neandertalensis or Neandertal man. Neandertal man had spread throughout Europe, the Near East, and Asia before one hundred thousand years ago. Then, quite suddenly, anatomically modern humans appeared throughout the Old World, replacing Neandertal man completely by about thirty-five thousand years ago (Fagan, 1989).
The question that arises is whether Neandertal man evolved to become modern man, or if modern humans migrated into the areas that were inhabited by the Neandertals and eventually replaced them. According to Fagan (1989) there are two basic hypotheses. The first is the Neandertal phase hypothesis, which says that Homo erectus populations throughout the world evolved independently, first to archaic Homo sapiens, then to fully modern humans. This hypothesis supports multiple origins of modern man, thus, stating that modern geographic populations have been separated from one another for up to one million years. The second hypothesis uses the Noah's ark model. It states that Homo sapiens evolved in one place then spread across the Old World. Thus, according to this hypothesis, modern geographic populations have shallow roots and were derived from a single source of relatively recent times.
Evidence supports the Noah's ark model, that modern man evolved in a single location and then migrated across the Old World for four basic reasons. First, modern man could not have evolved in more than one place; as humans we are far too similar morphologically to have evolved separately (Fagan, 1989; Trinkaus, 1983). Second, the time that Neandertal would have had to evolve into fully modern man is too brief, only about five thousand years (Trinkaus, 1983). Modern man and the archaic Neandertal man may have coexisted in Europe (Fagan, 1983). ...