According to a study, modern humans lived in Europe around 54,000 years ago – around 10,000 years earlier than previously thought. At least that’s the conclusion drawn by an international team of researchers after excavations in a cave in the Rhone Valley in southern France. According to this, both Homo sapiens and Neanderthals inhabited the cave over the course of several millennia, albeit alternately in different phases.
The team led by Ludovic Slimak and Clément Zanolli from the Center National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) emphasized that the Neanderthals did not die out shortly after the appearance of modern humans. in the journal Science Advances. Instead, according to the team, both human species lived in the same region for almost 15,000 years. However, an independent expert is very skeptical about the team’s conclusions.
So far, researchers have assumed that the first modern humans reached Europe around 45,000 years ago – finds from Bulgaria and Italy indicate this. A few thousand years later, around 40,000 years ago, the Neanderthals had disappeared from the region. The researchers deduce from excavations in the Mandrin Cave in the Rhone Valley not far from Montélimar that modern man is said to have appeared much earlier. In the cave, Slimak’s team uncovered twelve find layers over a depth of three meters, which contained a total of well over 100,000 remains of animals and stone tools.
Grotto Mandrin in France.
(Photo: Ludovic Slimak)
The researchers are concentrating on a particularly conspicuous layer: There they discovered a tooth fragment, presumably from a child, which they assign to Homo sapiens based on its shape and structure. In addition, they emphasize, the stones there were worked with a different technique than in the neighboring – older and younger – layers, which therefore contained typical Neanderthal relics. According to the researchers, the stone tips and blades from the layer in question show a striking precision during production. In addition, they are similar to finds from the Levant that are associated with Homo sapiens.
Are the stone spikes and blades in the grotto really Homo Sapiens?
(Photo: Laure Metz and Ludovic Slimak)
The layer is about 54,000 years old, the team writes, citing radiocarbon and luminescence dating. Accordingly, Neanderthals previously used the cave, then it was inhabited by modern humans. Neanderthals followed later, until about 44,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens moved in again. The researchers conclude from their analyzes that the extinction of the Neanderthals was not the result of a one-time upheaval, but the result of a longer, much more complex process.
The milk tooth could also come from a different layer
Jean-Jacques Hublin, director emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, is not entirely convinced of the authors’ conclusions. “The problem is that the study is based on only one tooth.” This actually shows a morphology typical of Homo sapiens. But it could come from another, much younger soil layer: “A milk tooth is a tiny object that can easily migrate from one layer to another.” The crucial question of the integrity of the sediments is hardly discussed by the authors.
Hublin does not accept the authors’ second argument, the different manufacturing technology. The expert emphasizes that it is extremely problematic to conclude that a species belongs to a species based solely on the technology used. “This technique is not beyond the ability of Neanderthals,” he says. If the team’s interpretation turns out to be correct, it would be a rather surprising scenario, Hublin said. “In that case, a group of modern humans would have lived in the middle of a Neanderthal ocean, with no other traces further east in Europe.”