Digging Deep: Cave discovery in France stretches Homo sapiens’ presence in Europe 10,000 years

A team of scients from France have found skeletal remains of Homo sapiens in association with Neronian tools. The discovery pegs the exence of Homo sapiens in Europe at around 56.8-51.7 kya (thousand years ago), nearly ten millennia prior to what has been conventionally thought. The site of the finding is a rock shelter named Grotte Mandrin in the Rhone Valley in France.
Homo sapiens appear in Europe much later, with a consent fossil record found only ~45 kya. Palaeoanthropologs have attributed this to geographical barriers as well as the presence of archaic hominin species like the Neanderthals. It is important to contrast this with the dispersal of Homo sapiens from Africa to other regions of the world. Homo sapiens emerged in Africa ~300 kya, and their first remains outside Africa come from Israel ~194-177 kya (ref 3). Going the current model, they are posited to have entered Asia around 80-60 kya. Their arrival in Australia was around 65 kya, and in the Americas (the ‘New World’) was only 25 kya.
The site conss of a 3 m deep stratigraphic sequence consing of 12 archaeological layers. A considerable number of dental remains were recovered from all layers, with Layer E yielding a ‘deciduous maxillary second molar crown.’ The study examines characterics like tooth morphology and enamel thickness to conclude that the single tooth found in Layer E was dinct from those of Neanderthals recovered from other layers as it came from a Homo sapiens individual.

The article elaborates that its ‘root gets thinner toward the apical part, either since it was still growing or because it was at an advanced resorption stage’ and most likely belonged to a child. The date of Layer E was determined – using the geochronological sequence and radiocarbon – to be 56.8-51.7 kya.
Layer E is marked a lithic industry consing of very small points that are no more than a centimetre in length. These are dinctively different from the Mousterian industry that characterise other layers.
Stone tools are conventionally classified into ‘lithic industries,’ based on their morphological characterics and are associated with a particular group of hominins. For example, Aurignacian is associated with modern humans, Mousterian is associated with Neanderthals, and Acheulian with Homo erectus. The names of the industries typically come from the place where they were first discovered. The lithic industry found at Layer E was chrened ‘Neronian,’ after Grotte de Neron where they were first documented. This tool typology is more akin to that of some younger sites.

Neronian tools recovered from Layer E show great homogeneity, which says a lot about the sourcing of rocks: almost half of the rocks come from a very large area, up to a radius of 90 kms. The ‘Layer E humans had a large territorial influence,’ the study argues. Furthermore, Neronian technologies stand apart from Mousterian ones in that they are extremely standardised to millimetric precision – and extremely light.
‘It is very likely that these points were used in advanced mechanical propulsion weaponry systems like the bow or spear-thrower, while Neanderthal groups had heavy hand-cast spears,’ clarifies Ludovic Slimak, lead author of the study, in an email exchange.
The authors also thought of employing DNA markers analysis to determine if the aforementioned molar found in association with the Neronian technology belonged to a Homo sapiens or a Neanderthal individual, but decided against it. ‘We did attempt paleogenetic analyses on a few horse teeth from the same level where the modern human tooth was found, but unfortunately it was impossible to recover a sufficient amount of DNA and we thus decided not to run aDNA analysis on the human tooth,’ said Clément Zanolli, one of the corresponding authors of the study in an email with indianexpress.com.
‘The tooth is very precious. There’s some chance there’s preserved DNA in it,’ adds Ludovic Slimak. The idea of DNA extraction has been put on hold until they have the technology to get a good DNA yield from the tooth.
All in all, the finding implies that the Neanderthals and Homo sapiens indeed shared the same space and time, albeit for just a few decades. Grotte Mandrin shows a scenario where the site was occupied Neanderthals and Homo sapiens in quick succession: a Neanderthal home, a brief modern human incursion at 56-51 kya, and Neanderthal reoccupation. The study argues that the reason behind this is that the Rhone river forms ‘the only natural path’ between continental Europe and the Mediterranean. Slimak asserts that it is no coincidence that the Rhone valley also houses the Chauvet cave, the oldest painted cave in the world, just 25 kms away from Grotte Mandrin.
The author is a freelance science communicator. (mail@ritvikc.com)