Pioneering human groups braved icy environments to settle northern Europe more than 45,000 years ago. neanderthalScientists said Wednesday.
An international team of researchers has discovered human bones and tools hidden behind huge boulders in a German cave, the oldest traces of Homo sapiens yet discovered in the north.
The discovery could rewrite the history of how this species inhabited Europe and how it came to replace the Neanderthals, who mysteriously went extinct just a few thousand years after humans arrived.
When the two coexisted in Europe, there was a “substitution phenomenon” between the Middle and Upper Paleolithic periods, French paleoanthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin, who led the new study, told AFP.
Archaeological evidence, including two types of stone tools, was discovered from this period, but it was difficult to determine exactly who made them due to the lack of bones.
Particularly puzzling are tools from the “Lincombian-Ranisian-Jerzmanowician” (LRJ) culture, found in several regions north of the Alps, including Britain and Poland.
A site near the town of Ranis in central Germany was the focus of three new studies published in the journal Nature.
The cave was partially excavated in the 1930s, but the team hoped to find more clues during excavations between 2016 and 2022.
Excavations in the 1930s were unable to penetrate nearly six feet of rock blocking the path. But this time, scientists succeeded in removing it by hand.
“We had to go down to 8 meters (26 feet) underground and climb a wall to protect the excavator,” said Hublin, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.
They were rewarded with leaf-shaped stone blades and thousands of bone fragments seen at other LRJ sites.
“A huge surprise”
The team used a new technique called paleoproteomics, which extracts proteins from fossils, to determine which bones were animal bones and which were human bones.
Through radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis, they determined that the cave contained the remains of 13 humans.
This means that the stone tools in the cave, once thought to have been made by Neanderthals, were actually made by humans as early as 47,500 years ago.
“No human fossils have been found at LRJ before, so this was quite surprising and a reward for our hard work in the field,” said co-author Marcel Weiss.
The fossils date from the period when the first Homo sapiens left Africa for Europe and Asia.
“We have long thought that a huge wave of Homo sapiens swept across Europe and quickly absorbed Neanderthals at the end of the transitional culture about 40,000 years ago,” Hublin said.
But recent discoveries suggest that humans populated the continent earlier than previously assumed, making repeated small-scale journeys.
This means that modern humans have spent much more time living alongside their Neanderthal cousins, who last went extinct in southwestern Europe 40,000 years ago.
This particular group arrived in northern Europe, which was much colder than today and more similar to modern-day Siberia or northern Scandinavia, the researchers said.
They lived in small, mobile groups, stopping only briefly in caves where they ate the meat of reindeer, woolly rhinos, horses, and other animals they caught.
“How did Africans get the idea to head towards these extreme temperatures?” Hublin said.
In any case, he added, humans have proven to have “the technical capabilities and adaptability needed to live in a hostile environment.”
It was previously thought that humans could endure such cold temperatures only after thousands of years.
However, humans have outlived Neanderthals, who have long adapted to the cold.
What exactly happened to Neanderthals remains a mystery. But some have accused them of driving humans to extinction through violence, the spread of disease, or simply interbreeding with humans.