The Story of Humans and Neanderthals in Europe Is Being Rewritten

Not an expert, but the field as a whole is driven by discoveries. The only way we can know for sure what humans were where that long ago is to find actual human remains. The whole story doesn't get rewritten, but parts of it are revised all the time.

You’re doing a random sampling of the earth to find and date various bones. No matter how old the oldest one we find is, there is almost certainly an older one out there somewhere. Eventually they’ll stop being pushed as far back or found as frequently.

The entire field of human evolution has been pretty much entirely rewritten over the past decade or so. However, the media tends to sensationalize individual finds much more than they should be. What we're actually learning is that the reality is so much more complicated than the traditional model of humans evolving once in a particular part of Africa and eventually leaving to colonize the rest of the world.

Three reasons;

The first is headline hyperbole. Journalists use cliche and overstatemnts.

The second reason is "duplicate" reporting. An important find is made. First impressions are reported. Then experts give some early, off hand opinions. Measurements and such trickle in. The first papers are published. People comment on papers. Older evidence is re-examined. Other papers are published. So.. the same "revision" is reported multiple times.

Third, is yes. Human history is being re-written constantly atm. Paleo genetic evidence is adding knowledge. Dating is contantly improving. New sites are being discovered.

We have recently gotten strong evidence for the existence of 3-4 new named archaics, contemporary to sapiens: denisova, naledi, luzonensis & floriensis. Some of these are very subject to "reason 2."

But basically, yes. Evidence is mounting fast and theories are adapting fast too. Human paleontology is killing it!

It is just a lazy journalistic cliche used whenever there is some new historical or archeological discovery, however minor.

https://www.google.com/search?q=discovery+rewrites+history

Of course in a technical sense, this is always true.

Make me doubt the term “Settled Science”

Understandable given it's a jigsaw and we are still finding all the pieces, have a rough idea of what the final picture is, but that changes for every new piece of the puzzle found. Happens in so many aspects of life/science - look at physics.

Still waiting for the theory that modern human civilisation was founded by time traveling refugee's from a doomed future returning to a time when the environment was not killing them. After all, had pretty much every other interpretation of human history played out in the media and the line between media and hollywood does seem to blur more and more as time moves on.

Advances in genetics technology have opened up massive new troves of data in just the last few years - not just in analyzing old bones, but in analyzing the genomes of millions of living people to trace their ancestry. It'll be some time before all the new information gets integrated and synthesized into new theories.