Competitive Replacement
Even a slight competitive advantage on the part of modern humans could account for Neanderthals' replacement by anatomically modern humans on a timescale of 10,000–20,000 years.
The theory that early humans violently replaced Neanderthals was first proposed by French palaeontologist Marcellin Boule (the first person to publish an analysis of a Neanderthal) in 1912.
Another supporter of competitive replacement is Jared Diamond who points out in his book The Third Chimpanzee that the genocidal replacement of Neanderthals by modern humans is similar to modern human patterns of behavior that occur whenever people with advanced technology invade the territory of less advanced people.
Read more about this topic: Neanderthal Extinction Hypotheses
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