Earliest sapiens remains in Europe
From the
BBC:
They
may be yellowed and worn but these ancient teeth and jaw fragment have
something very revealing to say about how modern humans conquered the
globe.
The specimens, unearthed in Italy and the UK, have just been confirmed as the earliest known remains of Homo sapiens in Europe.
Careful
dating suggests they are more than 41,000 years old, and perhaps as
much as 45,000 years old in the case of the Italian "baby teeth".
...
The re-assessments have further importance because palaeoanthropologists
can now put modern humans in the caves at the same time as the stone
and bone tool technologies discovered there.
There has
been some doubt over who created the so-called Aurignacian artefacts at
Kents Cavern and the slightly older Uluzzian technologies at Grotta del
Cavallo. It could have been Neanderthals, but there is now an obvious
association in time with Homo sapiens.
From the
NY Times:
They
had in fact discovered the oldest known skeletal remains of
anatomically modern humans in the whole of Europe, two international
research teams reported Wednesday.
The scientists who made the
discovery and others who study human origins say they expect the
findings to reignite debate over the relative capabilities of the
immigrant modern humans and the indigenous Neanderthals, their closest
hominid relatives; the extent of their interactions; and perhaps the
reasons behind the Neanderthal extinction. The findings have already
prompted speculation that the Homo sapiens migrations into Europe may
have come in at least two separate waves, rather than just one.
I'll add the abstracts later.
This certainly seems to be incompatible with substantial Neandertal interbreeding.
If humans and Neandertals were genetically compatible species, then why
would they maintain very separate morphological populations for ~10ka?
We would expect the two populations to quickly merge into one. Moreover,
a longer period of interbreeding in West Eurasia would have left an
excess of "Neandertal" ancestry in modern West Eurasians, something we
simply don't observe.
"What
the new dates mean", Benazzi summarised, "is that these two teeth from
Grotta del Cavallo represent the oldest European modern human fossils
currently known. This find confirms that the arrival of our species on
the continent – and thus the period of coexistence with Neanderthals –
was several thousand years longer than previously thought. Based on this fossil evidence, we have confirmed that modern humans and not Neanderthals are the makers of the Uluzzian culture.
This has important implications to our understanding of the development
of 'fully modern' human behaviour. Whether the colonisation of the
continent occurred in one or more waves of expansion and which routes
were followed is still to be established."
Nature (2011) doi:10.1038/nature10484
The earliest evidence for anatomically modern humans in northwestern EuropeTom Higham et al.
The
earliest anatomically modern humans in Europe are thought to have
appeared around 43,000-42,000 calendar years before present (43-42 kyr
cal BP), by association with Aurignacian sites and lithic assemblages
assumed to have been made by modern humans rather than by Neanderthals.
However, the actual physical evidence for modern humans is extremely
rare, and direct dates reach no farther back than about 41-39 kyr cal
BP, leaving a gap. Here we show, using stratigraphic, chronological and
archaeological data, that a fragment of human maxilla from the Kent’s
Cavern site, UK, dates to the earlier period. The maxilla (KC4), which
was excavated in 1927, was initially diagnosed as Upper Palaeolithic
modern human1. In 1989, it was directly radiocarbon dated by accelerator
mass spectrometry to 36.4-34.7 kyr cal BP2. Using a Bayesian analysis
of new ultrafiltered bone collagen dates in an ordered stratigraphic
sequence at the site, we show that this date is a considerable
underestimate.
Instead, KC4 dates to 44.2-41.5 kyr cal BP. This
makes it older than any other equivalently dated modern human specimen
and directly contemporary with the latest European Neanderthals, thus
making its taxonomic attribution crucial. We also show that in 13 dental
traits KC4 possesses modern human rather than Neanderthal
characteristics; three other traits show Neanderthal affinities and a
further seven are ambiguous. KC4 therefore represents the oldest known
anatomically modern human fossil in northwestern Europe, fills a key gap
between the earliest dated Aurignacian remains and the earliest human
skeletal remains, and
demonstrates the wide and rapid dispersal of early modern humans across Europe more than 40 kyr ago.LinkNature (2011) doi:10.1038/nature10617
Early dispersal of modern humans in Europe and implications for Neanderthal behaviourStefano Benazzi et al.
The
appearance of anatomically modern humans in Europe and the nature of
the transition from the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic are matters of
intense debate. Most researchers accept that before the arrival of
anatomically modern humans, Neanderthals had adopted several
transitional technocomplexes.
Two of these, the Uluzzian of southern
Europe and the Châtelperronian of western Europe, are key to current
interpretations regarding the timing of arrival of anatomically modern
humans in the region and their potential interaction with Neanderthal
populations. They are also central to current debates regarding the
cognitive abilities of Neanderthals and the reasons behind their
extinction1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. However, the actual fossil evidence
associated with these assemblages is scant and fragmentary7, 8, 9, 10,
and recent work has questioned the attribution of the Châtelperronian to
Neanderthals on the basis of taphonomic mixing and lithic analysis11,
12.
Here we reanalyse the deciduous molars from the Grotta del
Cavallo (southern Italy), associated with the Uluzzian and originally
classified as Neanderthal13, 14. Using two independent morphometric methods based on microtomographic data, we show that
the Cavallo specimens can be attributed to anatomically modern humans. The
secure context of the teeth provides crucial evidence that the makers
of the Uluzzian technocomplex were therefore not Neanderthals. In
addition, new chronometric data for the Uluzzian layers of Grotta del
Cavallo obtained from associated shell beads and included within a
Bayesian age model show that
the teeth must date to ~45,000-43,000 calendar years before present. The Cavallo human remains are therefore the oldest known European anatomically modern humans,
confirming a rapid dispersal of modern humans across the continent before the Aurignacian and the disappearance of Neanderthals.Link
