Human evolution has an essential chapter: the transition between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens , which ended the latter’s survival after this encounter. The emergence and spread of modern humans in Europe is a difficult timeline to reconstruct due to the scarcity of sufficiently old remains in the fossil record. Now, as an international team of researchers has discovered, the first of our kind in Europe occupied a cave formerly inhabited by Neanderthals, whose remains of sapiens, almost 46,000 years ago, force us to move this cultural transition earlier than we thought.
A clearer chronology
Until now, most of the earliest human fossils on the continent were between 45,000 and 41,500 years old. But those ages are based on dates of sediments and artifacts associated with the fossils, not the fossils themselves. The new finds, a tooth and six bone fragments, as well as other artifacts found deep within Bulgaria’s Bacho Kiro cave (at the foot of the Balkans) are the oldest directly dated Homo sapiens remains in Europe, say the scientists. They date back between 46,000 and 44,000 years and add scientific evidence for a scenario in which African H. sapiens reached the Middle East about 50,000 years ago and then rapidly spread across Europe and Central Asia, experts report in the journal Nature.
Bacho Kiro is a rich Paleolithic fossil deposit that extends over 3,500 meters through Paleolithic galleries and corridors and whose re-excavations of the site began in 2015 (the first dating back to the 1970s but the discovered human remains were eventually lost). The excavation revealed a layer of sediment containing what appears to be the oldest human remains of our migrant ancestors ever identified in Europe .
“Most Pleistocene bones are so fragmented that, with the naked eye, you can’t tell what species of animal they represent,” says human evolution researcher Frido Welker from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and a co-author of the work.
Using various methods incorporating radiocarbon dating and mitochondrial DNA sequencing to estimate the age of the fossils, the researchers concluded that these ancient humans likely occupied the cave from approximately 45,820 to 43,650 years ago, although some of the remains could date back as far back as 46,940 years ago.
“Thus, to our knowledge, these bones represent the oldest Upper Paleolithic European hominins recovered to date,” the authors explain in one of two new papers describing the findings.
Among the artifacts discovered, various ornaments, tools, weapons, and a pendant made from bear teeth resemble those found in earlier locations associated with Neanderthals, suggesting that there was interaction between the two groups before the latter’s eventual disappearance. .
“The Early Upper Paleolithic at Bacho Kiro Cave is the oldest known Upper Paleolithic in Europe. It represents a new way of making stone tools and new sets of behavior, including the making of personal ornaments that mark a differentiation from what we know of. Neanderthals up to this point, “said Tsenka Tsanova of the Department of Human Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
Experts note that ” ongoing work in this area is crucial” to understanding the timing of major events in hominin adaptations and demographic processes during this period in human history.
Referencia: Initial Upper Palaeolithic Homo sapiens from Bacho Kiro Cave, Bulgaria, Nature (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2259-z , www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2259-z
A 14C chronology for the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition at Bacho Kiro Cave, Bulgaria, Nature Ecology & Evolution, DOI: 10.1038/s41559-020-1136-3 , www.nature.com/articles/s41559-020-1136-3
