Neanderthals and humans lived side by side in Northern Europe 45,000 years ago, genetic analysis shows

A genetic analysis of bone fragments discovered at an archaeological site in central Germany shows conclusively that modern humans, Homo sapiens, had already reached northern Europe 45,000 years ago, straddling Neanderthals for several thousand years before they became extinct.

The results establish that the site near Ranis, Germany, known for its finely scaled, leaf-shaped stone tool blades, is one of the oldest confirmed sites of modern Stone Age human culture in north-central and northwest Europe.

Evidence that Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis lived side by side is consistent with genomic evidence that the two species occasionally interbreed. It also fuels suspicion that the invasion of Europe and Asia by modern humans around 50,000 years ago contributed to the extinction of the Neanderthals, who had occupied the region for more than 500,000 years. .

The genetic analysis, along with archaeological and isotopic analysis and radiocarbon dating of the Ranis site, are detailed in a trio of journal articles Nature And Nature ecology and evolution.

Ranis stone blades, called leaf points, are similar to stone tools found at several sites in Moravia, Poland, Germany and the United Kingdom. These tools are believed to have been produced by the same culture, called the Lincombian-Ranisian-Jerzmanowician (LRJ) culture or technocomplex. Due to earlier dating, the Ranis site was 40,000 years old or more, but with no recognizable bones indicating who made the tools, it was unclear whether they were the product of Neanderthals or Homo sapiens.

The new findings demonstrate that “Homo sapiens made this technology and that Homo sapiens was this far north at that time, 45,000 years ago,” said Elena Zavala, one of the first four authors of the study. study. Nature article and Miller researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. “They are therefore part of the first Homo sapiens in Europe.”

Zavala held a Ph.D. student at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) in Leipzig in 2018 when she began working on the project, a major effort led by Jean-Jacque Hublin, former director of the institute and professor at Collège de France in Paris.

“The Ranis Cave site provides evidence for the first dispersal of Homo sapiens across the higher latitudes of Europe. It turns out that the stone artifacts thought to have been produced by Neanderthals were actually part of the toolbox of early Homo sapiens,” Hublin said.

“This fundamentally changes our previous knowledge about this period: Homo sapiens reached northwest Europe well before the disappearance of Neanderthals in southwest Europe.”

Bones of maternal relatives?

Zavala led the genetic analysis of hominid bone fragments from the new, deeper excavations at Ranis between 2016 and 2022 and from earlier excavations in the 1930s. Since the DNA of the ancient bones was highly fragmented, she used special techniques to isolate and sequence DNA, consisting entirely of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) inherited only from the mother.

“We confirmed that the skeletal fragments belonged to Homo sapiens. Interestingly, several fragments shared the same mitochondrial DNA sequences, even fragments from different excavations,” she said.

“This indicates that the fragments belonged to the same individual or its maternal relatives, linking these new findings to those from decades ago.”

The bone fragments were initially identified as human through the analysis of bone proteins – a field called paleoproteomics – by another first author, Dorothea Mylopotamitaki, a doctoral student at the Collège de France and formerly of MPI-EVA.

By comparing Ranis’ mitochondrial DNA sequences with mtDNA sequences obtained from human remains at other Paleolithic sites in Europe, Zavala was able to construct a family tree of early Homo sapiens across Europe. All but one of the Ranis fragments were quite similar to each other and, surprisingly, resembled mtDNA from a 43,000-year-old woman’s skull discovered in a cave in Zlatý kůň in the Czech Republic. The only standout grouped with an Italian individual.

“This raises some questions: Was this a single population? What might the relationship be here?” Zavala said. “But with mitochondrial DNA, that’s only one side of the story. It’s only the maternal side. We would need nuclear DNA to be able to start studying that.”

A transitional site between the Middle and Upper Paleolithic

Zavala specializes in analyzing DNA found in long-buried bones, on bone tools, and in sediment. His research in sediments from different levels of the Ranis excavations revealed DNA from a wide range of mammals, but none from hominids.

The analysis, combined with morphological, isotopic and proteomic analysis of bone fragments, paints a portrait of the environment of this era and the diet of humans and animals who occupied the cave over the millennia.

The presence of reindeer, cave bears, woolly rhinoceroses and horse bones, for example, indicates cold climatic conditions typical of the steppe tundra and similar to those in Siberia and northern Scandinavia today , as well as a human diet based on large land animals. The researchers concluded that the cave was primarily used by hibernating cave bears and hyenas, with only periodic human presence.

“This lower-density archaeological signature matches other Lincolnian-Ranisian-Jerzmanowician sites and is best explained by timely, short-term visits by small, mobile groups of H. sapiens pioneers,” according to one of the published papers. In Nature ecology and evolution.

“This shows that even these early groups of Homo sapiens scattered across Eurasia already had some ability to adapt to such harsh climatic conditions,” said Sarah Pederzani, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of La Laguna in Spain, who led the paleoclimatic study of Eurasia. site.

“Until recently, it was thought that resilience to cold climate conditions only emerged several thousand years later, so this is a fascinating and surprising result.”

The Ranis site, called Ilsenhöhle and located at the foot of a castle, was initially excavated mainly between 1932 and 1938. The leaf tips found there were eventually attributed to the last years of the Middle Paleolithic, around 300,000 to 30,000 years ago. or the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic, which began around 50,000 years ago.

Due to the importance of the Ranis site for understanding the LRJ technocomplex and the transition from the Neanderthal-associated Middle Paleolithic to the modern human Upper Paleolithic in central Europe, Hublin and his team decided to re-excavate the site at using modern archaeological tools. .

The new excavations extended down to bedrock, around 8 meters below the surface, and involved the removal of a rock, probably fallen from the cave ceiling, which had interrupted previous excavations. Here, Hublin’s team discovered flint tool flakes and a quartzite flake corresponding to the LRJ technocomplex.

Subsequent proteomic analysis of thousands of recovered bone shards confirmed that four were from hominids. Among the bone fragments discovered during excavations in the 1930s, nine came from hominids.

Zavala’s DNA analysis confirmed that the 13 bone fragments came from Homo sapiens.

A Revised History of the Settlement of Northern Europe

The team also carried out radiocarbon dating of human and animal bones from different layers of the site to reconstruct the chronology of the site, focusing on bones with traces of human modifications on their surfaces, which links their dates to the human presence in the cave.

“We found very good agreement between the radiocarbon dates of the Homo sapiens bones from the two excavation collections and with the modified animal bones from the LRJ layers of the new excavation, establishing a very strong link between the remains “The evidence suggests that Homo sapiens sporadically occupied the site 47,500 years ago,” said another first author, Helen Fewlass, a former Max Planck researcher and now a postdoctoral fellow with the European Research Organization. molecular biology (EMBO) at the Francis Crick Institute in London.

“The results from the Ilsenhöhle in Ranis have fundamentally changed our ideas about the chronology and history of the settlement of Europe north of the Alps,” added Tim Schüler from the Thuringian State Office for Conservation. historical monuments and archeology in Weimar, Germany.

Among the other co-authors of Nature The paper is co-first author Marcel Weiss of Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg and Shannon McPherron of MPI-EVA, who co-led the Ranis excavations with Hublin, Schüler and Weiss. Zavala, in addition to being co-first author of Nature article, co-author of both articles in Nature ecology and evolution.