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