The End of a Neanderthal Clan Vol.1 Encounter B&W Edition: Paleolithic Science Fiction

This novel was started to be written in Japanese, in 2020, in response to an article in the journal "Science" which announced that a portion of wall paintings of El Castillo cave in Cantabria, Spain was 48,000 years old and might be created by Neanderthal. At that time, I was a participant in a research group called "Replacement of Neanderthals by Modern Humans: Testing Evolutionary Models of Learning" which was led by Prof.Takeru Akazawa of the University of Tokyo. Additionally, since 1997, I had been working on the "Digital Archives Project for the Cave Arts in Northern Spain" in collaboration with Prof. César González Sáinz of the University of Cantabria and had an opportunity of visiting many paleolithic caves in Northern Spain. Namely, based on the knowledge and experience I gained through these projects, I attempted to reconstruct the replacement of Neanderthals by Cro-Magnons in the form of science fiction. For this attempt, it was necessary to clarify exactly what the Neanderthals were, but in this book, I assumed the following genealogy as a hypothesis and described it in a narrative form. 1) Neanderthals evolved from Homo Heidelbergensis approximately 350,000 years ago i…