About a decade ago, the theory that Neanderthals had bred with Homo sapiens outside of Africa rocked the anthropological, archeological, and genetics worlds. Some scientists looked down on these now extinct human cousins, but quickly learned that they themselves could share as much as four percent of their DNA with Neanderthals. The question of how long ago and where this interbreeding occurred is still being debated. Now, some new analysis is further filling in the timeline of Neanderthal and modern human interactions and the two may have intermingled for quite some time. Â
[Related: Neanderthals were likely creating art 57,000 years ago.]
A new genetic analysis of bone fragments from an archaeological site in central Germany shows that modern humans had reached northern Europe 45,000 years ago. This means that their arrival overlapped with the Neanderthals who had been living there for several thousand years before going extinct. The evidence also adds to the suspicion that the movement of modern humans into Europe and Asia about 50,000 years ago helped drive Neanderthals into extinction. The findings are described in three new papers published January 31 in journals Nature and Nature Ecology and Evolution.
Neanderthals were living in northern Europe for more than 500,000 years by the time that modern humans began to arrive. A multidisciplinary team of researchers studied bone fragments and stone tool blades from a site near Ranis, Germany. It was first explored in the 1930s, but a team from institutions in Austria, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States re-excavated the area from 2016 to 2022.
This site is best known for some finely flaked, leaf-shaped stone tool blades called leaf points. The leaf points found there were dated to the final years of the Middle Paleolithic period— between 300,000 and 30,000 years ago—or the beginning of the Upper…
Read the full article here