Pruning the family tree, chance & inevitability

I picked up Clive Finlayson's The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived mostly for its alternative history value. By this, I mean that it was published in the fall of 2009, less than a year before research which suggests that not all Neanderthals went extinct, in that ~2.5% of the genomes of non-Africans derive from this human lineage. Going by the subtitle I'd assumed that Finlayson's treatment would be useful, despite its likely false premise. Of course the author was no fool, he was channeling the consensus of his time, even citing the mitochondrial DNA studies which indicated no admixture between between the Neanderthal and modern human lineages. But to my surprise the overturning of a central presupposition of the book did little to alter the theses of Finlayson's narrative. In many ways the subtitle was something of a bait & switch. The author clearly ...