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Microscopic fragments of protein and DNA recovered from bones found in the dirt of an 8 meter deep cave revealed that Neanderthals and humans probably lived side by side in northern Europe as far back as 45,000 years ago.
Genetic analysis of the fossils, found in a cave near the town of Ranis in eastern Germany, suggested that modern humans were making distinctive, leaf-shaped stone tools that archaeologists believe were created by Neanderthals, the hominins who was greatly taken. who lived in Europe until about 40,000 years ago.
It was not previously known that modern humans, or homo sapiens, lived as far north as the region where the tools were made.
“The Ranais cave site provides evidence for the first dispersal of Homo sapiens across the higher latitudes of Europe. It turns out that stone artifacts invented by Neanderthals were, in fact, part of the early Homo sapiens toolkit,” said research author Jean-Jacques Hullin, professor at the Collège de France in Paris and director emeritus at the Center. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, in a news release.
“This fundamentally changes our previous knowledge of the period: Homo sapiens reached northwestern Europe long before Neanderthals disappeared in southwestern Europe.”
The discovery means that the two groups, which interbred and left most people alive today with traces of Neanderthal DNA, may have overlapped for several thousand years. It also shows that Homo sapiens, our species, crossed the Alps into the cold climes of northern and central Europe earlier than thought.
Three studies detailing the findings and laboratory analysis were published Wednesday in the journals Nature and Nature Ecology & Evolution.
The earliest Homo sapiens fossils found north of the Alps
The stone tool style found at Ranis has been found in other parts of Europe, from Moravia and eastern Poland to the British Isles, according to the studies. Archaeologists call the tool style Lincombian-Ranisian-Jerzmanowician, or LRJ, in reference to the places where it was first identified.
To identify who made the artifacts, the team excavated the Ilsenhöhle cave near Ranis from 2016 to 2022. When the cave was first excavated in the 1930s, only the tools were found and analyzed. This time the team was able to dig deeper and more systematically, eventually uncovering human fossils there for the first time.
“The challenge was to excavate the entire 8-meter sequence from bottom to top, hoping that there were some deposits left over from the excavation of the 1930s,” said study co-author Marcel Weiss, a researcher at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen- Nürnberg and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in a statement. “We were lucky to find a rock 1.7 meters thick that the excavators had not gone before. After we removed that rock by hand, we finally found the LRJ layers and even found human fossils.”
However, the human remains were not immediately identifiable among the hundreds of bone fragments found during the six-year excavation. It was only later that the team knew for certain that the sediment layers that also contained the LRJ stone tools contained human remains.
The researchers used proteins extracted from bone fragments to identify the animal and human remains they found, a technique known as palaeoproteomics. It allows scientists to identify human and animal bones when their form is unclear or uncertain. Using the same technique, the team succeeded in identifying human remains among bones excavated during the 1930s.
However, the protein analysis was only able to identify the bones belonging to hominins – a category that includes Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis, or Neanderthals. To distinguish between the two, the team was able to extract fragments of ancient DNA from the 13 human fossils they identified.
“We confirmed that the skeletal fragments belong to Homo sapiens,” study co-author Elena Zavala, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, said in the release.
“Interestingly, several fragments had the same mitochondrial DNA sequences – even fragments from different excavations,” Zavala added. “This indicates that the fragments belong to the same person or maternal relatives, which links these new discoveries to those from years ago.”
Unexpected adaptability
Radiocarbon dating of the fossils and other artefacts in the cave indicated that these early humans lived there around 45,000 years ago, making them the earliest Homo sapiens to live in northwestern Europe.
The region would have had a very different climate then, with steppe tundra conditions similar to those found in Siberia today. The excavation revealed the presence of reindeer, cave bears, woolly rhinoceros and horses. The researchers also concluded that the cave was primarily used by hibernating cave bears and denning hyenas, with only periodic human presence.
“This shows that these earlier groups of Homo sapiens that spread across Eurasia already had some ability to adapt to such harsh climatic conditions,” said co-author Sarah Pederzani, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of La Laguna in Spain , who led the paleoclimate study on. The location. “Until recently, it was thought that resilience to cold climate conditions did not appear until thousands of years later, so this is a great and surprising result,” she said, according to the newsletter.
William E. Banks, a researcher at the University of Bordeaux in France, said the studies showed how new methods are allowing archaeologists to examine sites in unprecedented detail, increasing their ability to tell when a place was occupied. at the site.
“The findings provide another important piece to this complex cultural and demographic period in Europe,” Banks noted in a commentary published alongside the studies. Banks, however, who was not involved in the research, said archaeologists “need to be careful not to generalize findings from one or two sites”.
He noted that recent discoveries suggested that Neanderthals were more culturally and cognitively complex than popular stereotypes suggest and that archaeologists should not “need to assume” in all cases that modern humans made more a complex of stone tools from that crucial period before the Neanderthals disappeared.
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