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Microscopic protein and DNA fragments obtained from bones discovered in 8-meter-deep cave soil revealed that Neanderthals and humans probably lived side by side in Northern Europe until 45,000 years ago.
Genetic analysis of fossils found in a cave near the town of Ranis in eastern Germany has suggested that modern humans were makers of distinctive, leaf-shaped stone tools that archaeologists believe were once made by Neanderthals, heavily built hominins. It lived in Europe until about 40,000 years ago.
Modern humans, or homo sapiens, were not previously known to live as far north as the area where tools were made.
“The Ranis cave site provides evidence for the early dispersal of Homo sapiens across the high latitudes of Europe. Stone artefacts thought to have been produced by Neanderthals turned out to actually be part of the early Homo sapiens toolkit.” A newsletter from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
“This fundamentally changes our previous knowledge of the period: Homo sapiens reached northwestern Europe long before Neanderthals disappeared from southwestern Europe.”
The discovery means the two groups may have overlapped for several thousand years, once interbreeding and leaving most humans alive today with traces of Neanderthal DNA. This also shows that our species, Homo sapiens, crossed the Alps and reached the cold climates of northern and central Europe earlier than thought.
Three studies detailing the discoveries and laboratory analyzes were published Wednesday in the journals Nature and Nature Ecology & Evolution.
The oldest Homo sapiens fossils found north of the Alps
According to research, the stone tool style found at Ranis has also been discovered elsewhere in Europe, from Moravia and eastern Poland to the British Isles. Archaeologists call the tool style Lincombian-Ranisian-Jerzmanowician, or LRJ, in reference to where it was first described.
The team excavated the Ilsenhöhle cave near Ranis from 2016 to 2022 to determine who made the artifacts. When the cave was first excavated in the 1930s, only tools were found and analyzed. This time, the team was able to dig deeper and more systematically, resulting in human fossils being unearthed there for the first time.
“The challenge was to excavate the 8-meter array from top to bottom, hoping that some remnants from the excavations in the 1930s remained,” said study co-author Marcel Weiss, a researcher at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg and the Max Planck Institute. In a paper for Evolutionary Anthropology. “We were lucky to find a 1.7 meter thick rock that previous excavators could not pass. “After removing that rock by hand, we finally uncovered the LRJ layers and even found human fossils.”
But human remains were not immediately identified among the hundreds of bone fragments unearthed during the six-year excavation. Only later did the team realize for certain that the sediment layers containing the LRJ stone tools also contained human remains.
Using a technique known as paleoproteomics, the researchers used proteins extracted from bone fragments to identify the animal and human remains they found. It allows scientists to identify human and animal bones when their shapes are vague or unclear. Using the same technique, the team also managed to identify human remains among bones excavated in the 1930s.
But protein analysis could only identify the bones as belonging to hominins (a category that includes Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis, or Neanderthals). The team managed to extract ancient DNA fragments from the 13 human fossils they identified to distinguish between the two.
“We confirmed that the skeletal fragments belonged 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 shared the same mitochondrial DNA sequence—even fragments from different excavations,” Zavala added. “This suggests that the pieces belong to the same individual or that they are related on the maternal side, linking these new finds to ones from decades ago.”
unexpected compatibility
Radiocarbon dating of fossils and other artifacts from the cave revealed that these early humans had been living there since about 45,000 years ago; This makes them the oldest Homo sapiens known to have lived in northwestern Europe.
At that time, the region would have had a very different climate, with typical steppe tundra conditions found in present-day Siberia. The excavation revealed the existence of reindeer, cave bear, woolly rhinoceros and horses. The researchers also concluded that hibernating cave bears and sheltering hyenas primarily use the cave, which has only periodic human presence.
“This shows that even early groups of Homo sapiens distributed across Eurasia already had the capacity to adapt to such harsh climate conditions,” said co-author Sarah Pederzani, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of La Laguna in Spain, who led the paleoclimate research. . site. “Until recently, it was thought that cold-climate tolerance did not emerge until several thousand years later, so this is a fascinating and surprising result,” he said, according to the news release.
William E. Banks, a researcher at the University of Bordeaux in France, said the studies show how new methods allow archaeologists to examine sites in previously unseen detail and improve the ability to pinpoint when a site was occupied.
“The discoveries provide another important piece of the puzzle of a culturally and demographically complex period in Europe,” Banks said in a commentary published with the studies. But Banks, who was not involved in the research, added that archaeologists “need to be careful not to generalize findings from one or two sites.”
He noted that recent discoveries suggest that Neanderthals were more culturally and cognitively complex than popular stereotypes suggest, and that archaeologists should not in any case “assume” that modern humans were making more complex styles of stone tools from that crucial period before the Neanderthals disappeared.
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