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Tens of thousands of years ago, Europe’s hottest real estate was a rock shelter in southern France. Grotte Mandrin had everything a hominin could want. A rocky ledge that provides shelter from the rain. Wide view of a valley and bison and deer roaming below. A prime location in the Rhône Valley, an important natural corridor connecting the Mediterranean Basin to the northern lands.
The prehistoric pad was so desirable that about a year after the shelter was occupied by Neanderthals, a group of Homo sapiens moved in. A few Neanderthal tenants followed, followed by another settlement of modern humans. The scientists presented these findings in a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature. Science Advances.
Rather than showing that Neanderthals and modern humans were joint tenants of the European landmass over time, this new discovery pushes back the timeline of the earliest modern human settlements in Europe. Scientists say the first modern human inhabitants of the Mandrin were there about 54,000 years ago – given that Europe was primarily thought to have been the Neanderthals’ stalling grounds.
This is 10,000 years earlier than previously thought. site in greece dates back to 210,000 years). The article describes human settlement based on a modern human milk tooth and stone tools that appear to have been made by Homo sapiens.
“This is really interesting and exciting,” wrote Katerina Harvati, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany who was not involved in the research. It “shows the complexity of modern human dispersal on the European continent and eventually superseded by Neanderthals” that occurred around 40,000 years ago.
Naomi Martisius, a Paleolithic archaeologist at the University of Tulsa who was not involved in the research, described the discovery of alternative occupations as “extremely interesting.” But she points out that more evidence is needed to confirm that modern humans, or even a hybrid species, made these tools.
Ludovic Slimak, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Toulouse in France and author of the paper, spent decades excavating the Grotte Mandrin. The cave opens to the north where a cold strong wind known as the mistral breathes the dust beneath the rock shelter.
Dr. “This millennial wind brings sand from the Rhône River and deposits it in the cave,” Slimak said. “It’s like a kind of Pompeii without catastrophic events,” he said. These conditions preserved the cave in an extraordinary way. It gave Slimak the feeling that “artifacts from 55,000 years ago were left only five minutes ago.”
Researchers claim that the sands of Grotte Mandrin are filled with stone tools, many of which are clearly made by Neanderthals. Dr. “I read flint like you can read books,” said Slimak. Dr. Slimak said that while Neanderthal flint was largely unique, with different texture and morphology, Homo sapiens produced more standardized flint.
Dr. By this reasoning, Slimak concluded that the flint extracted from certain layers of the Grotte Mandrin came from humans, not Neanderthals.
A few human remains in the shelter gradually revealed themselves. Dr. “We find a tooth every 10 months,” Slimak said. After the researchers excavated nine teeth, Dr. Slimak sent the fossils to Clément Zanolli, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Bordeaux in France and author of the paper.
Dr. “Some of the teeth were a little odd,” Zanolli said. “Some were typically Neanderthal, but there was probably a non-Neanderthal tooth.” Dr. When Zanolli scanned the teeth to examine the internal structure with micro-tomography, he found that eight teeth belonged to Neanderthals and one tooth definitely belonged to modern humans.
Dr. The teeth and tools together make up a “convincing argument,” Harvati said.
After an unsuccessful attempt to extract DNA from fossil horse teeth found in the sanctuary, the researchers decided not to extract DNA from the human tooth.
Sahara Talamo, a researcher at the University of Bologna in Italy who was not involved in the study, said she expects the new paper to spur discussions until that tooth’s genetic material is sampled. Dr. Talamo said he understands why the authors might be concerned about partially destroying a unique human remains. However, he stressed that “the only way to avoid speculation and create false scenarios is to directly date the sample.”
Although the researchers found only one modern human tooth, they said the presence of alternating layers of modern human tools suggests multiple Homo sapiens placements in the shelter. Ségolène Vandevelde, an archaeologist at the University of Paris-Saclay and author of the paper, analyzed soot deposits on the cave roof to determine when fires broke out in the cave. The amount of soot led them to find that only one year elapsed between a group of Neanderthals moving out of the house and the first modern humans.
These people remained in the Grotte Mandrin for about 40 years before leaving the shelter for unknown reasons. Neanderthals then raided once again for the next 12,000 years, then again replacing Homo sapiens, which spent several hundred years there.
Dr. Harvati said the new paper adds to scientists’ growing understanding that modern humans’ migration to Europe was a gradual, complex process that often resulted in local extinction. “Modern humans were not always ‘winners’ in this process,” he wrote.
Dr. Martisius hopes that future publications will illuminate the lives of the early instrument makers at the Grotte Mandrin. “Who were they? How long did they stay in Western Europe?” “Where did they go?” he asked.
The researchers plan to publish more articles on their excavations at Grotte Mandrin, taking their place as the latest in a long line of hominins to take refuge in the cave.
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