The discovery of remains of the first humans north of the Alps adds unknowns to the relationship between sapiens and Neanderthals

47,000 years ago, in the heart of Europe, halfway between modern-day Frankfurt and Berlin, the climate was frigid, similar to what can be found now in Siberia.

However, these conditions did not scare the pioneers of the first human colonization of the region.

Between 1932 and 1938, in the Ilsenhöhle cave, in Ranis (Germany), thousands of fossils of a multitude of animal species had been found, some difficult to identify, along with some leaf-shaped tools, possibly used for hunting, which were known as the LRJ (Lincombian-Ranisian-Jerzmanowician) industry.

These objects, found in Poland, Germany or the United Kingdom, were usually associated with the last Neanderthals, the species of hominids that inhabited Europe for tens of thousands of years before the arrival of

Homo sapiens

.

But a work published today in the journal

Nature

, along with two more that appear in

Nature ecology

&

evolution

, may change that interpretation of history.

In 2016, an international team of scientists led by Jean-Jacques Hublin, from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (Germany), returned to the Ilsenhöle cave to complete the information collected in the 1930s and try to identify the authors of the LRJ tools.

With new techniques to date remains, identify ancient DNA or reconstruct the climatic conditions and diet of cave visitors, they were able, for the first time, to associate modern humans with technology previously attributed to Neanderthals.

In this way, they also confirmed its presence at such an early time in an area so far north, where it froze almost all year round.

“In the end, it seems that LRJ has nothing to do with Neanderthals.

“It is one of the European forms of the Upper Paleolithic [the period in which modern humans replaced the diversity of species of the human lineage present up to that time] that appeared in the Near East, where it was produced by

H. sapiens

leaving Africa.” says Hublin.

More information

A Neanderthal family found for the first time: a father and his daughter, on the brink of extinction

The new results are one more piece of a long process of reconstructing ancient human migrations from Africa.

There were already remains of

Homo sapiens

from 50,000 years ago in Bulgaria and even signs from 54,000 years ago in southeastern France.

In the Ilsenhöle cave, the possibility of recovering DNA from the Pleistocene, a technology developed by Svante Pääbo, Nobel Prize winner in Medicine in 2022, made it possible to identify remains found in the 2016 campaign as human and also do so with some of those recovered in the decade. from 1930.

Sarah Pederzani, researcher at the University of La Laguna, works in the laboratory.MPI EVAN

In that shelter, fossils of animals well adapted to the cold were discovered, such as hyenas that used it as a shelter or cave bears that hibernated there, and there are also bones of woolly rhinoceroses or reindeer, which, on occasions, served as food for the little ones. human groups that ventured so far north.

Sarah Pederzani, a researcher at the University of La Laguna who authored the paleoclimatic study in

Nature ecology & evolution

, comments that “until recently it was thought that resistance to such cold climatic conditions did not appear until several thousand years later, so it is a surprising result.”

One of the possible explanations behind the effort to adapt to such an extreme climate is the herds of large animals that could be found in that Central European steppe.

For Hublin, these results show that, since “these groups of pioneers were already capable of facing such a harsh environment” and “they had more flexibility than the Neanderthals to adapt,” the small groups that arrived took advantage of that ability to settle on the periphery. north of the domains of the other species and live off the available game.

The association of LRJ technology with our species and the date of arrival in northern Europe leaves unknowns about the relationship between sapiens and Neanderthals.

On the one hand, it would have been possible that the stone blades, perhaps used in hunting, were developed by the new immigrant species and then adapted by the native Neanderthals, or even that the exchange of knowledge would have occurred in the other direction. .

Although it seems likely that the newcomers are, in part, to blame for the disappearance of those other humans, there is evidence that they had children together and, at least in some cases, imitated cultural products of the other species.

In the case of the Ilsenhöhle remains, the authors believe that, despite what had been thought, the carved leaves were a sapiens invention.

“There are technological similarities with other H. sapiens

technologies

,” but “for now we have no evidence that [LRJ] was learned by Neanderthals,” notes Weiss.

Regarding the sapiens influence on the Neanderthal decline, Weiss is cautious: “At the moment, we can only say that there were populations of

H. sapiens

in northern Europe when the Neanderthals lived in the southwest.

Whether they met or interacted, it cannot be said for now.”

Hublin adds that “it took a long time for the Neanderthals to be replaced further south, in France or Spain.”

That, he concludes, only happened with the next human wave, the one that arrived less than 40,000 years ago and is associated with Aurignacian technology, which erased the genetic footprint of those sapiens who adapted to the cold and replaced the Mousterian way of making tools that had been useful to Neanderthals for the previous 800 centuries.

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