by Inside a cave beneath a medieval German castle, researchers have discovered a pit of bones that they say unlocks the secrets of the earliest humans.
The remains – buried in layers of soil in the collapsed cave – contained the genetic material of cave bears, hyenas and 13 bones of early humans who died around 45,000 years ago.
The findings – described in three papers published Thursday in the journals Nature and Nature Ecology & Evolution – show that early humans went further north earlier than scientists realized, could make spear-shaped tools, and that there were people at that time. how to thrive in temperatures much cooler than today’s climate.
The discoveries, made possible due to the development of new DNA technology, are reshaping how scientists understand the time when both humans and Neanderthals walked the continent of Europe.
“Because of the age of this site and this site, we know definitively that there was a lot of overlap between Neanderthals and humans,” said Elena Zavala, a paleo and forensic geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley, who helped author the three study. The species have probably roamed the same geography for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years.
The discoveries could bring scientists closer to understanding why Neanderthals eventually died out and what role humans played in their demise.
John Hawks, a University of Wisconsin-Madison paleoanthropologist who studies ancient human relatives but was not involved in this research, said the study helps confirm the theory that patches of different human cultures were developing as the Neanderthals nearing its end.
“These groups are investigating. They are going to new places. They have been living there for a while. They have lifestyles that are different,” he said of the early humans. “They are comfortable moving into areas where Neanderthals were.”
These discoveries were only possible because previous researchers had left no stone unturned. Archaeologists in the 1920s and 1930s previously excavated the Ilsenhöhle cave, below Ranais Castle in the Thuringia region of Germany. The castle was built above the cave long before any excavation.
At that time, the scientists hit a rock more than 5-feet-thick, which prevented them from burying in important layers of the collapsed cave.
In 2016, armed with modern excavation technology and new forms of analysis, the researchers returned. About 24 feet below the surface, they found layers containing leaf points – which look like spear points – and human bone fragments.
The discovery of human bone fragments prompted researchers to dig through the material excavated about nine years ago – where they found additional skeletal fragments.
“It was an unexpected surprise to find human remains mixed with animal bones that had been stored for almost a century,” Hélène Rougier, a paleoanthropologist at California State University Northridge, said in a news release.
In total, the researchers were able to identify 13 pieces of bone. DNA analysis confirmed that the bone fragments came from humans and also that some of them belonged to the same person or a family member. Tests on animal bones found nearby suggest that the climate was harsh – comparable to present-day Siberia.
That means humans thrived in an extreme climate around 45,000 years ago.
“These modern humans seem to have mastered or assembled a cultural package that allows them to thrive at northern latitudes better than Neanderthals,” Hawks said.
The study also suggests that humans used the leaf-point technology scientists once attributed to the Neanderthals.
“It’s a highly skilled process to make those things,” Hawks said of leaf points, which are flakes of rock thinned into the shape of an olive leaf. “The fact that people invested the energy to make us that beautiful thing tells about their social system. He informs us that they were not living hand to mouth. They had time to invest.”
The fate of the Neanderthals was a hotly debated topic. Has climate change harmed them? Did people kill them? Were they absorbed into humanity as the species interbred?
Today, depending on their ancestry, many people still have a sliver of Neanderthal DNA in their genetic code.
More complex genetic testing of the Ranis bone fragments, an ongoing project, could identify whether the recently discovered bone fragments contain traces of Neanderthal genes.
“The big question – is there Neanderthal DNA? Could these people have interbred with Neanderthals?” Zavala said.
According to the researchers, answers to questions like this in Ranais could help to give answers to the questions related to the life of our species.
“It goes after this question – what makes us human. 100,000 years ago, across the globe, there were different types of hominins on the planet,” Zavala said, referring to humanity’s close genetic relatives.
“Now, it’s just us. Why did that happen? How did evolution get to where we are and what does that mean for our future?”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
