Homo sapiens inhabited Europe at least 54,000 years ago, 10,000 years earlier than previously documented, and shared a cave in southern France with extinct Neanderthals for at least thousands of years.
A team of researchers, co-led by Ludovic Slimak, a cultural anthropologist at the CNRS and the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, has discovered in France remains of modern humans in an excavation layer approximately 54,000 years old, one of the oldest evidence of the presence of Homo sapiens in Europe.
The discovery has been made in the Mandrin cave, in the south of France, where soot remains from fires lit by Paleolithic inhabitants had previously been documented.
The site was once inhabited by groups of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, but the new research has found remains of modern humans between layers that contained Neanderthal fossils.
This suggests that Neanderthals and modern humans coexisted in Europe during this period and that they took turns inhabiting the cave.
However, the excavations do not provide any reliable evidence of a cultural exchange between the two species. The results have been published in the journal Nature.
54,000 years ago
Homo sapiens evolved in Africa more than 300,000 years ago, and Neanderthals and their ​​ancestors are believed to have occupied Europe between 300,000 and 40,000 years ago.
From time to time during that period, they had contact with modern humans in the Levant and parts of Asia. Then, around 48,000 to 45,000 years ago, modern humans spread throughout the rest of the world, while Neanderthals disappeared.
Mandrin’s finding suggests, however, that the two human species coexisted in at least some European regions at the same time. Therefore, they could have coexisted for thousands of years.
During excavations at Mandrin, researchers discovered fossilized remains and tools of modern humans placed between layers of Neanderthal fossils.
The oldest layer of modern human remains contained a tooth that Slimak, which the researchers positively assigned to Late Pleistocene Homo sapiens.
the oldest
The dating indicates that the owner of the tooth, probably a child between 2 and 6 years of age, lived between 56,800 and 51,700 years ago.
“This means that this individual is significantly older than any modern human remains documented to date in Europe,” the researchers write in their paper.
However, some researchers are not so sure that the stone tools or teeth were left behind by Homo sapiens, notes the journal Nature.
The tools from this layer are similar to those found at other more recent human settlement sites in the eastern Mediterranean.
The stones used were very uniform and some came from areas that are 90 kilometers away from Cueva de Mandrin. “This suggests that people at the time had a large territorial sphere of influence,” the researchers write.
Fast change
The Neanderthal stone tools found in the upper and lower layers differ markedly in shape and craftsmanship.
More precise tool analyzes also failed to provide evidence that modern humans and Neanderthals had culturally exchanged in terms of technical traditions.
The researchers were also unable to identify any cultural exchange between the various groups of Neanderthals that occupied the cave. “This is consistent with the scenario of a rapid exchange process with no major interactions,” Slimak and his colleagues write.
“The data show that the displacement of native Neanderthal groups was not a simple single event, but a complex historical process during which both populations in the same area replaced each other quickly or even abruptly, at least twice & rdquor ;, the researchers said.
first evidence
“The Mandrin sequence is the first evidence for plausible coexistence of Neanderthals and modern humans in a geographically defined area in Europe,” the researchers conclude in their paper.
If the cave was occupied by Homo sapiens, even briefly, it would place the species in Europe thousands of years earlier than other records suggest.
The oldest definitive remains of Homo sapiens in the region, confirmed with DNA, come from the Bacho Kiro cave in Bulgaria and are around 44,000 years old.
Reference
Modern human incursion into Neanderthal territories 54,000 years ago at Mandrin, France. Ludovic Slimak et al. Science Advances, 9 Feb 2022, Vol 8, Issue 6. DOI:10.1126/sciadv.abj9496