The cave is hidden below a medieval castle in the heart of the German town of Ranis.
The bucolic setting has been known for nearly a century by archaeologists and prehistorians.
It benefited from a first excavation campaign in the 1930s, marked by the discovery of numerous prehistoric tools.
But this site had not yet revealed its full potential.
Human remains have just been identified there, confirming in turn that different groups of
Homo sapiens
occupied a vast area north of the Alps more than 47,000 years ago. The results of these new excavations, carried out by the paleoanthropologist and professor at Collège de France Jean-Jacques Hublin, are presented in three articles published in the journals
Nature
and
Nature Ecology &
Evolution
.
They constitute an essential piece in the puzzle of the history of our ancestors and of this decisive period when two different humanities, Neanderthals and Sapiens, rubbed shoulders in Europe...
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