Mysterious artifacts suggest modern humans and Neanderthals lived side by side for millennia
More than 45,000 years ago, small bands of hunters chased horses, reindeer, and mammoth over a vast expanse of tundra that stretched across most of northern Europe. They rarely stayed anywhere for long, leaving behind a scattering of stone tools and traces of the odd campfire in the depths of caves.
For more than a century, archaeologists debated whether these artifacts were left by some of the last Neanderthals to roam Europe—or the first modern humans to brave the northern reaches of the continent.
A trio of papers published today in
Nature
and
Nature Ecology & Evolution
may help settle the question. Between 2016 and 2022, archaeologists recovered fragments of hominin bone from a cave in the central German village of Ranis. The bones were at least 45,000 years old,
and their DNA has now identified them as the remains of our species
. “We now have a
Homo sapiens
population in northern Europe long before Neanderthals disappeared,” says Marcel Weiss, an archaeologist at the Friedrich Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg who supervised the excavations.
What’s more, the bones were found with a type of stone blade known from other sites across northern Europe, from the British Isles to modern-day Poland. Archaeologists once assumed they were the handiwork of Neanderthals, but the Ranis bones hint that the tools—a style called Lincombian-Ranisian-Jerzmanowician (LRJ)—are modern humans’ calling card. ...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
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