50,000 years ago, Europe was the territory of Neanderthals.
A human group cousin of ours who occupied this continent for several hundreds of thousands of years.
But in just over 10,000 years, Neanderthals completely disappeared, giving way to our ancestors,
Homo sapiens .
, which emerged from Africa a few tens of thousands of years earlier.
The oldest traces of our ancestors in Europe date back to 45,000 years in the cave of Bacho Kiro, in Bulgaria.
A French research team postpones the arrival of modern humans on the continent by nearly 10,000 years with the discovery of a 54,000-year-old remains of
Homo sapiens
in the Mandrin cave in the Rhone Valley (
Science Advances
, February 9, 2002).
Ludovic Slimak, researcher at the CNRS and the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, who is the first signatory of this publication, has been excavating the Mandrin cave for more than thirty years.
He unearthed many artifacts making him…
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