These first modern humans are surprisingly shadowy. We know less about ourselves, curiously enough, than about almost any other line of hominids. It is odd indeed, as Tattersall notes, "that the most recent major event in human evolution—the emergence of our own species—is perhaps the most obscure of all." Nobody can even quite agree where truly modern humans first appear in the fossil record. Many books place their debut at about 120,000 years ago in the form of remains found at the Klasies River Mouth in South Africa, but not everyone accepts that these were fully modern people. Tattersall and Schwartz maintain that "whether any or all of them actually represent our species still awaits definitive clarification."
这些最早的现代人的情况不甚分明。很有意思的是，我们对自己的了解，少于对人科动物几乎任何别的分支的了解。塔特萨尔说，真怪，“人类进化过程中最近的一次重大事件——我们自己这个种的出现——也许是最扑朔迷离的”，甚至没有人能够确定现代人化石最早是在哪里发现的。有许多书里认为是在南非克莱西斯河口发现的大约12万年前的化石，但并不是每个人都承认他们就是真正意义上的现代人类。在塔特萨尔和施瓦兹看来，“代表我们这个种的是他们中的一些，还是他们的全部，还有待更进一步的确定。”

The first undisputed appearance of Homo sapiens is in the eastern Mediterranean, around modern-day Israel, where they begin to show up about 100,000 years ago—but even there they are described (by Trinkaus and Shipman) as "odd, difficult-to-classify and poorly known." Neandertals were already well established in the region and had a type of tool kit known as Mousterian, which the modern humans evidently found worthy enough to borrow. No Neandertal remains have ever been found in north Africa, but their tool kits turn up all over the place. Somebody must have taken them there: modern humans are the only candidate. It is also known that Neandertals and modern humans coexisted in some fashion for tens of thousands of years in the Middle East. "We don't know if they time-shared the same space or actually lived side by side," Tattersall says, but the moderns continued happily to use Neandertal tools—hardly convincing evidence of overwhelming superiority. No less curiously, Acheulean tools are found in the Middle East well over a million years ago, but scarcely exist in Europe until just 300,000 years ago. Again, why people who had the technology didn't take the tools with them is a mystery.
智人最先出现在地中海东部，即在今天以色列所在的地区，这点已经无可争辩，他们大约开始出现在10万年前——但是即使在耶里，他们也被（特林考斯和希普曼）描述为“零散的，难以分类和所知甚少的”。尼安德特人已经在这一地区定居下来，并且使用了一种被称为莫斯特的工具，这种工具后来现代人显然认为值得加以借鉴。非洲北部从未发现过尼安德特人化石，但是他们的工具在那里随处可以找到。一定有人把它们带到了那里：现代人是惟一可能的候选。我们还知道，在中东地区，尼安德特人与现代人以某种方式共存了数万年。“我们不知道他们是否共处一处，还是彼此为邻。”塔特萨尔说。但是现代人非常乐于继续使用尼安德特人的工具——但这很难证明谁占绝对的优势。同样奇柽的是，中东地区发现的阿舍利工具是100万年以前的，但是这种工具出现于欧洲却仅仅在30万年前。问题又来了，为什么那些具有能力制造这种工具的人却没有随身携带它们呢？