I don't think these are necessarily incompatible theories. First, any theories about this period (the paleo revolution and/or dispersal era in a lot of theorie

I don't think these are necessarily incompatible theories. First, any theories about this period (the paleo revolution and/or dispersal era in a lot of theories) are very speculative and prone to change. We just don't have that much information. So, the margins are necessarily huge. So, both these bottleneck narratives are probably over-literal reading of the data we have, at least stated in simple forms. Either way, they point to a single small seed population. There could have been many times more people (neanderthals and sapiens) at the time and later, and they just passed on far fewer genes to 100ky later. Yuval Harari touches on the question you raise. Sapiens vs neanderthal (and others), and at one point do human behavioural characteristics (or more precisely their consequences) emerge as different. His take is (roughly): [1] "anatomically modern" sapiens existed for 100ky+ before these behaviours emerge. [2]Findings do not imply a big cognitive or behavioural gap between sapiens and earlier subspecies in this period. [3] there appear to be botlenecks in our lineage, dating to this period [4] The "paleo-revolution" happened in some form, and he believes it was primarily linguistic [5] Our language abilities allow flexible, large scale cooperation that is unrivaled in our clade, and did not widely exist in the lower paleolithic even in sapiens [6] he spends a lot of time on the nature of those linguistic tools. In a nutshell, advanced language allows symbolism, necessary for human-level culture. Trade. Chiefs. Tribes. Gods. Money. All that could have happened in a single cliffside cove. That seems possible. His argument/theory is attractive, but these things are far from set in stone. New findings will force all theories to adapt. Some will become unlikely.