Homo sapiens arrived in northern Europe more than 45,000 years ago, during an ice age when the temperature was between 7 and 15 degrees lower than today. This is demonstrated by the discovery of 13 Homo sapiens fossils in the Ilsenhöhle cave, in the town of Ranis (Germany), which is presented today in the magazine Nature. The region, with a climate similar to what Siberia has today, was then a steppe populated by reindeer, woolly rhinoceroses and cave bears.
Next to the human remains, lithic tools from the LRJ industry (by the initials of Lincombiana-Ranisiana-Jerzmanowiciana) have been found, which indicates that this industry was the work of Homo sapiens, and not of the Neanderthals who populated Europe at that time. .
This type of tools has been found in different sites along a strip of 2,000 kilometers that goes from Poland to England. Many of the tools found at Ilsenhöhle are also made with minerals from the Baltic Sea region, which is located about 500 kilometers north of the site.
“We know that there was a large wave of Homo sapiens that arrived in Europe about 40,000 years ago. Ranis’ results show that there were already small groups of Homo sapiens making incursions into northern Central Europe about 5,000 years earlier. This means that the migration of Homo sapiens to Europe was much more complex than previously thought,” Marcel Weiss, co-author of the research, from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, told La Vanguardia.
The new results imply that Homo sapiens coincided with Neanderthals in Europe for thousands of years, much longer than previously believed. “This fundamentally changes our knowledge about this period,” added Jean-Jacques Hublin, also from the Max Planck Institute, who led the project, in a statement.
The Ilsenhöhle cave, where the discovery was made, had been studied between 1926 and 1938, until excavations were interrupted by the Second World War. A large number of fossils and tools from the LRJ industry had been found there, but it was not known whether they had been made by Homo sapiens or Neanderthals.
Excavations resumed in 2016, allowing more fossils and tools to be found and studied with more advanced techniques.
A proteomic analysis has shown that thirteen of the fossils are human remains. Of them, four have been found since 2016 and the other nine correspond to excavations in the 20th century, although at that time it could not be established that they were humans.
A genomic analysis of mitochondrial DNA has made it possible to determine which human species the fossils belong to: they are Homo sapiens and not Neanderthals. Five of them have identical mitochondrial DNA, which means that they correspond to the same individual, or to individuals related through the maternal line (since the mitochondrial DNA of the children is the same as that of the mother, and therefore is also the same between siblings). The exact number of individuals whose remains have been found in the cave has not been determined.
Human fossils have been found in two layers of sediments whose age has been calculated by radiocarbon dating. The oldest of the two is between 45,770 and 47,500 years old, which makes these remains of Homo sapiens the most primitive found north of the Alps. The most recent, located just above, is between 43,260 and 46,820 years old.
In the same layers of sediment, remains of charred plants, animal fossils and stone tools have been found that have allowed us to reconstruct what the environment and way of life of those first Homo sapiens who arrived in northern Europe were like.
“Until now it was thought that resilience to cold climate conditions did not develop until several thousand years later. “Perhaps the cold steppes with large herds of animals were more attractive to these human groups than we had appreciated until now,” Sarah Pederzani, archaeologist at the University of La Laguna and co-author of the research, stated in a statement.
The results indicate that small groups of Homo sapiens intermittently occupied the Ilsenhöhle cave, which was also used by cave bears for hibernation and by hyenas as a den. Their diet included reindeer, horse and woolly rhino meat.
The arrival of Homo sapiens in northern Europe more than 45,000 years ago indicates that “there were first exploratory waves of sapiens that did not have continuity,” says Jordi Rosell, archaeologist at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES), who has not participated in the project. The pioneers of the Ilsenhöhle cave “possibly did not leave genetic traces on later hunter-gatherers,” the researchers point out along these lines in Nature.
According to Rosell, “it is being shown that the disappearance of the Neanderthals and the arrival of the first sapiens is a more complex problem than we thought.”
