The story often told, and Reich tells it elsewhere himself, is that modern humans were more advanced in several ways, technology being a crucial one.
Here is a discussion that seems to give a different impression entirely for extinction of archaic humans with the onset of modern humans:
"Whatever the reason for the fact that Upper Paleolithic technology never spread to southern East Asia, it is clear from what happened next, and the success these people had in displacing the previously resident pop-ulations such as Denisovans, that Upper Paleolithic technology itself was not essential to the successful spread of modern humans into Eurasia after around fifty thousand years ago. It was something more profound than Upper Paleolithic stone tool technology---an inventiveness and adaptability of which the technology was just a manifestation---that allowed these expanding modern humans to prevail everhwhere, including in the east." David Reich, p. 193
This specious account is susceptible to many objections.
One quite obvious one is this. What if this Whig enlightenment account of modern human entrepreneurial nimbleness were actually the result of something as simple, and for a Whig progressive account, as disappointing, as the spread of modern human diseases out of Africa for which archaics had no resistance but for which modern humans had developed resistance?
The spread of European diseases to the genetically isolated Siberian population of the Western hemisphere in the age of discovery is the classic example of a population collapse. Both populations were modern humans.
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