The standard classification of humans had living people, the Neanderthals, and diverse remains from sites like Broken Hill in Africa and Solo in Java all classified as members of our species. With such different-looking fossil members within Homo sapiens, the origins of features like a chin, a small brow ridge, and a globular skull were, not surprisingly, lost in a morass of diversity. Moreover, with the predominance of Multiregional or Neanderthal Phase models, the origins of those features were apparently scattered among many different ancestors living right across the Old World, so modern human evolution was not so much an event as a tendency; we were merely the end result of continuing long-term trends in human evolution in features like increasing brain size and decreasing tooth and face size. For human behavior too, there was an emphasis on gradual evolutionary trends; for example, in France the “transition” from the Middle Paleolithic Mousterian to the Upper Paleolithic Gravettian via the Châtelperronian industry was seen as supporting a parallel local evolution from Neanderthals to Cro-Magnons.
