Human fossil discovery upends history of Palaeolithic Europe

Bone fragments push migration timeline way back.

A SURPRISE discovery of human remains “fundamentally changed” the story of our species’ migration into Europe. It suggests that Homo sapiens likely made it to northern Europe by 47,500 years ago, overlapping with Neanderthals. Until now, the oldest Homo sapiens remains in this region were about 40,000 years old.

The discovery was made by a large team led by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPIEA), who excavated a cave near the German village of Ranis, 240km south-west of Berlin. The cave had first been excavated in the 1930s, uncovering several artefacts dated to 43,000 years ago, including leaf-shaped stone blades that at the time were thought to be fashioned by Neanderthals.

The researchers led by MPIEA had returned to the cave to gather more information on the Neanderthal occupants, but instead found 13 human skeletal remains, confirmed by analysing genetic material. According to team member Marcel Weiss, an archaeologist at the University of Erlangen-nuremberg, “this came as a huge surprise”.

The fossils were unearthed among thousands of bone fragments from the many mammals that used the cave for shelter over time, including denning hyenas and hibernating cave bears, along with the discarded bones of game like reindeer, horses and woolly rhinoceros, hunted by humans.

Using radiocarbon dating, the team then narrowed down the period of human occupancy of the cave to about 47,500 years ago, a time when the European continent had a harsher, colder climate, similar to today’s Scandinavia.

“It turns out that stone artefacts that were thought to be produced by Neanderthals were in fact part of the early Homo sapiens tool kit,” says Jeanjacques Hublin, a palaeoanthropologist at Collège de France. “This fundamentally changes our previous knowledge about this time period: Homo sapiens reached northwestern Europe long before Neanderthal disappearance in southwestern Europe.”

The team’s findings were published across three papers in Nature.

Analysis of more than 1,000 animal bones from the cave site beneath the castle of Ranis (below) showed that early Homo sapiens hunters processed the carcasses of both herbivores like reindeer and carnivores like wolves (above left). Among the bones, archaeologists also found stone tools with bifacial leaf-shaped blades (above right), once thought to be made by Neanderthals, but now suspected to be made by humans.