He was there before. Modern man, Homo sapiens, ventured into European Neanderthal territory much earlier than reported so far, as evidenced by fossils and tools from Mandrin cave (Drôme), on the Rhône, in France, according to a study of science released Wednesday, February 9. So far, archaeological discoveries have indicated the disappearance of Neanderthals from the European continent around 40,000 years ago, shortly after the arrival of his “cousin” Homo sapiens (around -45,000 years ago). Without any clue betraying a cohabitation between these two human species.
The discovery by the team of archaeologists and paleoanthropologists led by Ludovic Slimak, CNRS researcher at the University of Toulouse, pushes back the arrival of Homo sapiens in Western Europe to around 54,000 years ago. Another remarkable fact, it reveals his occupation of the Mandrin cave alternately with Neanderthal, where Sapiens usually replaced the latter for good.
Ludovic Slimak and his team came to this conclusion through the analysis of an archaeological layer, called “E”, which contains at least 1,500 points of cut flint. Very small in size, some less than a centimetre, these points “are normalized, to the nearest millimeter, standardized, something that we do not know at all in Neanderthals”explains the specialist in Neanderthal societies. The similarity between the techniques used makes him suppose that Mandrin is the first site listing Homo sapiens in Europe. He then had confirmation that his track was the right one: a milk tooth, found in the famous “E” layer, came to confirm it.
Thus, researchers estimate that Homo sapiens came to Mandrin Cave just one year after Neanderthals passed through this shelter. When Homo sapiens leaves it definitively, Neanderthal returns there, much later (approximately a thousand years). “At one point the two populations either co-existed in the cave or on the same territory”, concludes Ludovic Slimak, qui imagines that Neanderthal could have served as a guide for Sapiens to lead him to the best sources of flint available. “In ethnography, the question of taking guides into uncharted territory is universal”, he remarks. Understanding their overlap is, in any case, essential to explaining why we have become the only remaining human species.