When did the first representatives of Homo sapiens reach Europe? Finds from a cave in Bulgaria now provide an answer to this previously controversial question. There, researchers discovered teeth, bones and numerous stone tools that come from Homo sapiens. According to dating, these relics are around 45,000 years old – the oldest clear evidence of the presence of our ancestors in Europe. The great age of these finds also shows that many of the tools originally attributed to the Neanderthals originally came from Homo sapiens. The last Neanderthals then copied these techniques from the newcomers.
For around 250,000 years, the Neanderthals were the dominant species in Europe. They populated our continent from the Iberian Peninsula to the Urals and left countless deposits, various tools and their dead. But the era of this early human being ended around 45,000 years ago: the populations of Homo neanderthalensis shrank, but a new species of people spread across Europe – Homo sapiens. However, it is still unclear when our ancestors arrived in Europe and when their first populations established themselves, because there are only a few human fossils from this period. The oldest uniquely dated relics of our species in Europe have so far been the around 41,000 year old bones of a Homo sapiens from the Pestera cu oasis, a cave in Romania. Among other things, it is controversial which type of man made the roughly 45,000-year-old stone tools that were found at some excavation sites in Europe. Some assign them to the Neanderthals based on bone finds in the same place, but for others the originator is less clear.
45,000 year old homo sapiens relics
Finds in the Bacho-Kiro cave in Bulgaria are now providing a new answer to these questions. In this site around 70 kilometers south of the Danube, numerous stone tools and some human bone fragments of undetermined origin were discovered back in the 1970s. An international team of researchers led by Jean-Jacques Hublin from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig has been carrying out further excavations there since 2015. In one of the layers in the bottom of the cave they came across more than 2000 stone tools, bone beads, pendants and thousands of animal bones with traces of work. Some teeth and bone fragments of human origin were among them. “Most of the bones from the Pleistocene are so dismembered that you can’t tell at first glance what kind they come from,” explains co-author Frido Welker from the University of Copenhagen. “However, because the amino acid sequence of the proteins differs from species to species, we can use protein mass spectrometry to assign these bone finds.” At the same time, the researchers also isolated genetic material from the teeth and pieces of bone and were thus able to draw conclusions about the species.
The analyzes showed that the relics clearly come from Homo sapiens and thus from our species. This suggests that the tools found in the cave were also made by these anatomically modern people. But when was this? To find out, a second team led by Hublin’s colleague Helen Fewlass subjected most of these findings to extensive radiocarbon dating. “This gives us a very clear picture of when Homo sapiens lived in this cave,” says the researcher. The radio carbon data from the Bacho-Kiro cave are the largest data set ever collected from a Paleolithic site, and at the same time the most precise. Accordingly, the finds date from 45,820 to 43,650 years ago, the oldest relics could even be almost 47,000 years old.
Neanderthals peered from Homo sapiens
The human relics from the Bacho-Kiro cave are the oldest uniquely dated finds of Homo sapiens in Europe to date. “The Bacho-Kiro cave provides us with evidence of the first spread of Homo sapiens in the temperate latitudes of Eurasia,” says Hublin. “These pioneer groups brought new behaviors to Europe and interacted with local Neanderthal groups. This scenario also sheds new light on the stone tools typical of this period around 45,000 years ago. So far, many of them have been assigned to the Neanderthals because it was assumed that they were created before the first Homo sapiens representatives arrived. However, the finds in the Bacho-Kiro cave prove that our ancestors were already present at that time and also made tools of the type of the so-called late Paleolithic. “The late Palaeolithic period represented a new way of making stone tools and new behaviors, including the manufacture of jewelry,” explains Hublin’s colleague Tsenka Tsanova.
The findings of the Bacho-Kiro cave now prove that it was not the Neanderthals who developed these techniques, but that they were probably brought in by the newly immigrant Homo sapiens, said Hublin and his colleagues. However, because Neanderthals and Homo sapiens lived side by side and in close contact for a few thousand years, the Neanderthals probably adopted some of these techniques. “The old age of the material found at the Bacho-Kiro-Höhe supports the assumption that the behavioral changes in the dwindling Neanderthal populations resulted from contacts with the immigrant Homo sapiens,” say the researchers. This explains why tools from the late Palaeolithic period were also discovered at some sites of the last Neanderthals.
Source: Jean-Jacques Hublin (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig) et al., Nature, doi: 10.1038 / s41586-020-2259-z; Helen Fewlass Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig) et al., Nature Ecology & Evolution, doi: 10.1038 / s41559-020-1136-3