Tens of thousands of years ago, the most popular real estate in Europe was a rock shelter in the south of France. Cave Mandrin had everything a humanoid could wish for. A rocky overhang that provided shelter from the rain. Wide view of a valley and the bison and deer roaming below. A prime location in the Rhone Valley, an important natural corridor linking the Mediterranean with the northern countries.
The prehistoric trail was so attractive that about a year after the shelter was taken by Neanderthals, a group of Homo sapiens took up residence. They were followed by several Neanderthal tenants, and then another settlement of modern humans. Scientists presented these findings in a paper published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.
This new discovery not only shows how Neanderthals and modern humans were co-tenants of Europe’s landmass over time, but shifts the timeline for the earliest modern human settlements in Europe. The scientists say the first modern human inhabitants of Mandrin were there about 54,000 years ago — a time when Europe was thought to be mostly Neanderthals.
That’s 10,000 years earlier than previously thought (with the notable exception of an even earlier site in Greece that dates back to 210,000 years ago). The article describes human settlement based on a modern human milk tooth, as well as stone tools that appear to have been made by Homo sapiens.
“This is really interesting and exciting,” Katerina Harvati, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany who was not involved in the study, wrote in an email. “It shows the complexities of modern human distribution across the European continent and the eventual replacement of Neanderthals,” which occurred about 40,000 years ago.
Naomi Martisius, a Paleolithic archaeologist at the University of Tulsa who was not involved in the study, called the discovery of the alternating occupations “extremely intriguing.” But she cautions that more evidence is needed to confirm that modern humans, or even a hybrid species, made those tools.
Ludovic Slimak, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Toulouse in France and author of the paper, spent decades excavating Grotte Mandrin. The cave opens to the north, where a cold and strong wind known as the mistral breathes dust beneath the rock shelter.
“This wind for millennia carries the sand from the Rhone River and deposits it in the cave,” said Dr. slimak. “It’s a bit like Pompeii, without catastrophic events.” These conditions have exceptionally preserved the cave, allowing Dr. Slimak felt that artifacts from “55,000 years ago had been left behind just five minutes ago,” he said.
The sands of Grotte Mandrin were littered with stone tools, many of which were clearly made by Neanderthals, the researchers say. “I read a flint like you can read a book,” Dr. Slimak said. While Neanderthal flints are largely unique, with different textures and morphology, Homo sapiens made more standardized flints, said Dr. slimak.
By this logic, the flints excavated from certain layers of Cave Mandrin appeared to have come from humans, not Neanderthals, Dr. slimak.
The few human remains in the shelter slowly revealed themselves. “We find one tooth every 10 months,” said Dr. slimak. After the researchers dug up nine teeth, Dr. Slimak the fossils to Clément Zanolli, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Bordeaux in France and an author of the paper.
“Some teeth were a little odd,” said Dr. Zanolli. “Some were typically Neanderthals, but there was one tooth that probably wasn’t Neanderthals.” When Dr. Zanolli scanned the teeth with microtomography to examine the internal structure, he found that eight teeth belonged to Neanderthals and one tooth was unmistakably modern humans.
Together, the teeth and tool make “a compelling argument,” said Dr. harvati.
The researchers decided not to extract DNA from the human tooth after a failed attempt to extract DNA from fossil horse teeth also found at the shelter.
Sahra Talamo, a researcher at the University of Bologna in Italy who was not involved in the study, said she expected the new paper to spark debate until that tooth’s genetic material is sampled. dr. Talamo said she understands why the authors might be concerned about partially destroying a unique human body. But, she stressed, “the only way to avoid speculation and create false scenarios is to date the copy directly.”
Although the researchers found only one modern human tooth, they said the presence of alternating layers of modern human tools suggested there were multiple settlements of Homo sapiens at the shelter. Ségolène Vandevelde, an archaeologist at the University of Paris-Saclay and author of the paper, analyzed the soot deposits from the cave roof to determine when fires had started in the cave. The amount of soot led to their discovery that only one year passed between the time a group of Neanderthals left and the first modern humans took up residence.
Those people stayed in Grotte Mandrin for about 40 years before leaving the shelter for unknown reasons. The Neanderthals eventually resurfaced for the next 12,000 years, before being succeeded again by Homo sapiens who spent several hundred years there.
The new paper adds to scientists’ growing understanding that the migration of modern humans to Europe was a staggered, complex process that often ended in local extinctions, said Dr. harvati. “Modern people have not always been the ‘winners’ in this process,” she wrote.
dr. Martisius hopes that future publications will shed light on the life of the early toolmakers in Grotte Mandrin. “Who were they? How long were they in Western Europe?” she asked, “Where have they gone?”
The researchers plan to publish more articles about their excavations at Cave Mandrin, taking their place as the latest in a long line of hominids to have found refuge in the cave.
