Tracing our history

About five years ago, I visited the Lascaux caves in Dordogne, France. This cave complex contains some of the most celebrated cave paintings in the world. Our Homo sapiens ancestors were scribbling on the cave walls there about 17,000 years ago. The images mainly depict bison and bears, deer and even rhinoceros.

This palaeolithic art represents early humans’ ability to express themselves. But it is far from the oldest cave paintings that have been discovered.

There are amazing handprint paintings in South Sulawesi, Indonesia, estimated to be about 40,000 years old. In Spanish caves, there are paintings that have been dated at 65,000 years old.

That means Neanderthals would have to have produced them. This subspecies of archaic humans is thought to have died out around 40,000 years ago, not long after Homo sapiens arrived in Europe and Eurasia.

The prevailing narrative is that they shared a brief and uneasy coexistence, along with some interbreeding, traces of which are evident in our DNA today.

But two remarkable new studies published in Nature journals last week suggest humans arrived in Europe more than 45,000 years ago, some 5000 years earlier than previously thought.

A tooth and fragments of bone from the Bacho Kiro Cave in a Balkan mountain range have yielded DNA that confirmed their species –Homo sapiens – and carbon dating dated them at 43,000 to 46,000 years old.

The new evidence extends the period these two species of early humans co-existed. They may have met, fought, settled briefly as neighbours, for thousands of years, before Neanderthals faded out while Homo sapiens multiplied and thrived.

Another intriguing find was numerous bone and stone tools and pendants made from cave bear teeth. Similar tools and ornaments have been recovered from later Neanderthal archaeological sites in Europe.

It suggests that Neanderthals borrowed these techniques from Homo sapiens arriving in the region.

Interestingly, the DNA work showed that those early humans who occupied the Bacho Kiro Cave didn’t spread their genes to Europe.

Later waves of Homo sapiens migrating from Africa into Europe are instead the ancient forebears of modern Europeans.

The new evidence extends the period these two species of early humans co-existed.