A failure, then a murder

Modern humans split from the Denisovan-Neander clade 600kBC and, over the Eemian, mostly failed to follow their long-estranged cousins. After the Eemian, the north got colder, and in the south our ancestors became more and more warm-adapted and never adopted tech for cold. The Horn of Africa was, I think, also drier.

Those Neanders (now oh-so-slightly mixed with old Africans) in Europe continued their pre-Eemain adaptations for the post-Eemian forests, I'm thinking near-taiga. This culture is called Mousterian.

Around 60kBC, our ancestors tried again from the Horn of Africa. This time they got at least to the Indian Ocean, a climate not too far off that of the Horn. Once widely dispersed through Asia they tried Europe again, with arrows. One Asian group settled Bacho Kiro 43kBC... to die. That has canonically been the earliest modern-human incursion, a failure. All these tribes were tiny, hence the famous inbreeding among at least the Neanders; one bad flu-season or a cold-snap and the tribe was doomed.

The latest news is that the Neronian culture 52kBC up the Rhône, although decidedly in the Neander Age and among Mousterian artifacts, is not by Neanders itself. Neronian came from a "Levantine Initial Upper Paleolithic" culture and settled, here, something of a colony. These wildly different races held an intercourse in trade. We can suspect the "intimate" sort of intercourse... but it's not detectable; interbreeding might not bred true in most cases.

After forty years these Neronian colony simply vanished, leaving the Mousterian-Neanders alone. The site has no real evidence of violence so I assume the Neanders simply quit trading with the modern humans. The humans, themselves in no great number, had no real choice but to float back downriver.

Around 43kBC came Châtelperronians. Like the Neronian, the Châtelperronian culture had come from the Levant in this case "Northern Early Ahmarian". Otherwise these had no cultural link with the Neronians, meaning: a different language. Châtelperronian mostly skirted the Catalan coast even unto the Atlantic. Note: contemporary with the Romanians, but wholly different. Châtelperronian did not attempt the Rhône, which remained Mousterian. The Grauniad claims this wave also "failed" although by contrast with the spectacular Neronian exodus, I'm unclear of the nature of that Châtelperronian failure.

It took until the (proto)Aurignacians for modern humans to "unite" the subcontinent. These are associated with a southern Ahmarian. It may be that they outhustled the Châtelperronian holdouts, Romanians, and Neanders alike. That Campanian volcano was also a thing.