Stone Age Homo sapiens started migrating into Europe for much longer in the past than has usually been assumed.
Discoveries at a rock-shelter in southern France put H. sapiens in Europe as early as 56,800 years in the past, a brand new examine finds. That’s round 10,000 years sooner than beforehand thought (SN: 5/11/20).
The French web site, known as Grotte Mandrin, was alternately occupied by the H. sapiens newcomers and Neandertals native to Europe, changing one another a few occasions earlier than Neandertals died out roughly 40,000 years in the past, researchers report February 9 in Science Advances.
The finds from the rock-shelter, located 225 meters above the center Rhône River Valley, problem a preferred view that Neandertals died out inside a number of thousand years of H. sapiens reaching Europe, say archaeologist Ludovic Slimak of the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès in France and colleagues.
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Slimak has directed excavations at Grotte Mandrin for the final 24 years. Nearly 60,000 stone artifacts and greater than 70,000 bones of horses, bison and different animals have been unearthed in 12 sediment layers. Only 9 remoted hominid tooth have been present in 5 of these layers. But these tooth might be categorized as both Neandertal or H. sapiens based mostly on their sizes and styles, the researchers say. The oldest H. sapiens materials within the rock-shelter features a single tooth from a 2- to 6-year-old little one, Slimak says.
Dating of every sediment layer relied on radiocarbon age estimates for excavated bone artifacts and calculations of the time elapsed since every set of finds was buried and sure stones had been heated throughout toolmaking.
Given this proof, it now seems that H. sapiens teams periodically entered southern Europe lengthy earlier than Neandertals went extinct, says paleoanthropologist Isabelle Crevecoeur of the University of Bordeaux in France, who didn’t take part within the new examine. “The arrival of Homo sapiens in Europe after the demise of Neandertals was probably the end of a long, sometimes unsuccessful, migration process.”
H. sapiens who first settled at Grotte Mandrin consisted of a number of dozen people or extra, Slimak estimates. Archaeological proof signifies that, between 56,800 and 51,700 years in the past, these historic folks inhabited the positioning for some 40 years. “This was not a short-term hunter-gatherer camp but a tentative colonization of Europe,” Slimak says.
Resident Neandertals and historic H. sapiens migrants had at the very least transient contacts, Slimak says. Flint utilized by H. sapiens to make instruments got here from sources positioned inside 100 kilometers of the rock-shelter in all instructions, data that might have been acquired solely with the assistance of Neandertals already well-versed within the area’s panorama, Slimak contends.
After H. sapiens’ 40-year keep, Neandertals returned to the rock-shelter, the place their earliest occupations date way back to 120,000 years in the past, the researchers discovered. H. sapiens reoccupied the positioning between about 44,100 and 41,500 years in the past — roughly 14,000 years after their preliminary go to. After that, Neandertals left no indicators of getting come again.
In an surprising twist, small stone factors and blades made by Grotte Mandrin H. sapiens as many as 56,800 years in the past match these beforehand attributed to H. sapiens at a web site in Lebanon relationship to round 40,000 years in the past. Archaeologists have struggled for over a century to determine who made the identical kinds of stone instruments, relationship to about the identical time, at a number of center Rhône Valley websites, together with Grotte Mandrin.
Ancient Middle Easterners whose descendants made instruments on the Lebanese web site traveled some 3,000 kilometers to succeed in Grotte Mandrin, possible by navigating vessels of some sort alongside the Mediterranean coast, Slimak suspects. Their toolmaking custom was then handed down by means of many generations by teams dwelling close to the rock-shelter, he speculates.
Though no proof exists of historic sea journeys from the Middle East to what’s now southern France, “it seems that H. sapiens arrived in Europe several times, and we cannot exclude that [they] arrived even earlier than 56,000 years ago,” says paleoanthropologist Stefano Benazzi of the University of Bologna in Italy, who was not a part of Slimak’s crew.
But the importance of the Grotte Mandrin finds, just like the evolutionary relationship of H. sapiens to Neandertals (SN: 12/13/21), is controversial. A single H. sapiens tooth deposited between 56,800 and 51,700 years in the past can’t conclusively reveal that H. sapiens however not Neandertals made instruments present in that sediment layer, says evolutionary biologist Clive Finlayson of the Gibraltar National Museum.
Genetic proof factors to mating between Neandertals and H. sapiens (SN: 4/7/21), elevating the likelihood that hybrid offspring of these populations usual stone instruments on the French web site, Finlayson says.
To verify the evolutionary identities of Grotte Mandrin’s varied Stone Age toolmakers, Slimak’s crew is now trying to extract historic DNA from hominid tooth and sediment on the web site.
