The Neanderthal-Sapiens Timeshare
OVER 700
feet (or about 60 stories) above France’s Rhône River stands a cave with more than 40,000 years’ worth of Neanderthal debris. Digging through the materials since the 1990s, archaeologists have found traces of campfires, butchered animal bones and well over 50,000 stone tools crafted in the broad, flat fashion typical of Neanderthals.
But after years of excavations, halfway down the 10-foot-deep pits, archaeologists uncovered hundreds of stone artifacts that didn’t belong: finely pointed tools that resembled arrow tips. “Something is not normal in this layer,” says Laure Metz, an archaeologist at Aix-Marseille University in France. “Something happened.”
In a February Science Advances paper combining three decades of research, Metz and colleagues concluded that “something” was sapiens: Modern humans inhabited the site, known as Mandrin, and filled it with their tools for one or two generations in the midst of millennia of Neanderthal occupation. Occurring 54,000 years ago, this short stint in Europe predates our species’ migration to the continent by 10,000 years.
To determine that sapiens left these points, the researchers compared the tools to those found at other digs. Based on their shape and subtle scars, the Mandrin points most resembled tools found alongside Homo sapiens fossils in present-day Lebanon — suggesting the squatters migrated from the Near East.
Colleagues also examined nine teeth found inside the cave. The only probable sapiens specimen, a baby tooth, came from the same layer as the foreign-looking points. Metz says the molar provided proof modern humans entered Mandrin 54,000 years back.
These sapiens almost certainly encountered Neanderthals, as both groups roamed the surrounding lands. Metz says “the meeting was not a bad one,” at least not initially. The quality material of the modern humans’ tools suggests the local Neanderthals showed them where to find the best rock, “like the tourists’ guide.”
But perhaps that hospitality waned. By dating campfire soot trapped in the cave, researchers showed the modern folks only lasted about 40 years; Neanderthals reclaimed the cave for the next 12,000.