Seafaring "cavemen"?

If they've dated tools correctly (a big if) that they found on Crete, then somebody was making tools there 170,000 years ago. That's pushing the boundaries of modern humans; the ones most active about then seem to have been the Neanderthals. There's no land bridge to Crete as far as I can see; and the big refilling was about 5,000,000 years ago. So whoever got to Crete went by water.

I don't trust dates on stone tools very far, but it is wild to imagine a group of Neanderthals on a raft or canoe. Maybe the Neanderthals were the smart ones after all.

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I gather the latest claim is that humans and Neanderthal didn't interbreed. If the reporter didn't screw the story up again it sounds like the researchers contemplated a kind of blurring between groups, with North African sharing more genes with Neanderthals via a common ancestor than South African. And then then North Africans were the ones that left for greener pastures. Which suggests far less mixing in Africa than I'd expect: wouldn't a group that wasn't averse to migrating migrate in different directions?