French cave findings suggest Europe’s first Homo sapiens arrived earlier than thought

Up to now, archaeological discoveries have suggested that Neanderthals disappeared from the European continent about 40,000 years ago, shortly after the arrival of their "cousins", Homo sapiens.

The latest research, by a team of archaeologists and palaeoanthropologists led by Ludovic Slimak of Toulouse University, pushes the arrival time of Homo sapiens in western Europe to around 54,000 years ago.

Another remarkable finding of the research published in Science Advances magazine is that the two types of humans may have alternated in inhabiting the Mandrin cave in what is now the Rhone region of southern France.

The Mandrin site, first excavated in 1990, includes layers of archaeological remains dating back over 80,000 years.

"Mandrin is like a kind of neandertalian Pompeii, without catastrophic events," says Ludovic Slimak. The layers of remains in the cave have been preserved under sand deposited by the Mistral winds.

Good point

His team uncovered a level, known as the "E layer", containing at least 1,500 cut flint points, more finely executed than any of the stone tools in the layers above or below.

Very small in size, some of them less than a centimetre in length, these points "are standardised, to the nearest millimetre, something we haven't seen at all with Neanderthals," said Slimak, a specialist in neanderthal societies.

These points, he explained, were probably arrowheads, unknown in Europe at that time.

Teething problems?

In 2016, Slimak and his team visited the Peabody Museum in Harvard to compare their discoveries with a collection of material recovered from the Ksar Akil site in Lebanon.

The similarity between the techniques used convinced Slimak that the findings at the Mandrin site were the first traces of Homo sapiens found in Europe.

Human remains discovered in the "E layer" confirmed his suspicions. Researchers found a total of nine teeth at the Mandrin cave site, the dental work belonging to six individuals.

These ancient teeth were entrusted to Clement Zanolli, a palaeoanthropologist at the University of Bordeaux.

Using medical scanning technology, Zanolli showed that one of the teeth found in the "E layer" was distinctively human.

That molar "provides the earliest known evidence of modern humans in western Europe," the Natural History Museum in London said in a statement.

Time-share, anyone?

The archaeological team then analysed layers of soot from the cave walls to show that the human population had occupied this Rhone territory for a period of probably 40 years.

At some point, the two populations may have shared the same territory, the research suggested.

Slimak imagines that Neanderthals could have served as guides to Homo sapiens, leading him to the best sources of flint available.

"This is precisely what happened when Europeans began the colonisation of the Americas or Australia," he notes.

"The findings from Mandrin are really exciting and are another piece in the puzzle of how and when modern humans arrived in Europe," concludes Professor Chris Stringer, co-author of the study and a specialist in human evolution at the Natural History Museum in London.

"Understanding more about the overlap between modern humans and other hominins in Eurasia is vital to understanding more about their interactions, and how we became the last remaining human species," he added.

(With AFP)