Grotte Mandarin, Vallée du Rhône, France
© Ludovic Slimak
Neronian Points
© Laure Metz and Ludovic Slimak
Scientists led by Dr Ludovic Slimak of the Université de Toulouse Jean Jaurès, and including Professor Chris Stringer, Research Leader in Human Evolution at the Natural History Museum in London, have discovered evidence of the earliest modern humans (Homo sapiens) in western Europe from a cave, known as Grotte Mandrin, in France’s Rhône Valley.
The date of this find, at 54,000 years pushes the first recorded presence of H. sapiens in Europe back by a bout 10,000 years. The evidence is in the form of a deciduous upper molar from a modern human child.
Apart from the early date for this fossil, other dental remains show a pattern of alternating occupation of the cave between modern humans and Neanderthals. Remains from the cave represent at least seven
In Grotte Mandrin, you’ve got a really nice sequence dated between about 60-40,000 years ago. In there are Mousterian stone tools made by Neanderthals, then the Neronian, then back to Mousterian tools, and then afterwards the appearance of modern humans with the Aurignacian industry.
The presence of the modern human molar alongside the Neronian is where the story really gets firmed up - both Neanderthal and modern human populations replaced the other several times in the same territory
The findings from Mandrin are really exciting and are another piece in the puzzle of how and when modern humans arrived in Europe. Understanding more about the overlap between modern humans and other hominins in Eurasia is vital to understanding more about their interactions, and how we became the last remaining human species.
individuals across 12 archaeological layers. The researchers identified six of these individuals as Neanderthal, but in a layer sandwiched between the Neanderthal layers, a fossil molar from a modern human child was found. This points strongly to a prolonged period of co-existence in contrast to the previous picture of rapid replacement of Neanderthals by modern humans.The presence of the modern human molar alongside the Neronian is where the story really gets firmed up - both Neanderthal and modern human populations replaced the other several times in the same territory
The findings from Mandrin are really exciting and are another piece in the puzzle of how and when modern humans arrived in Europe. Understanding more about the overlap between modern humans and other hominins in Eurasia is vital to understanding more about their interactions, and how we became the last remaining human species.
Professor Chris Stringer
Centre for Human Evolution Research (CHER)
Department of Earth Sciences
Natural History Museum, London, UK
Centre for Human Evolution Research (CHER)
Department of Earth Sciences
Natural History Museum, London, UK
Alongside the modern human molar were stone tools of a type known to archaeologists as Neronian, a type previously found in the Rhône Valley. It had been regarded as a technological anomaly due to its distinctive features and the fact that it had usually been found between classic 'Mousterian' Neanderthal layers.
The Rhône is one of the major rivers of Europe, flowing southwest from the Swiss Alps across south-eastern France to the form the extensive marshy delta known as the Camargue, where it enters the Mediterranean, west of Marseilles. The Rhône Valley forms an important link between the Mediterranean basin and the Northern European steppes. H. sapiens had been recorded in the Levant at around 54,000 years ago but there was a gap of about 10,000 before they then appeared in Europe at sites such as Zlaty Kun in Czechia and Bacho Kiro in Bulgaria. This discovery fills that gap and suggests the Mediterranean basin played an important part in the migration of early H. sapiens from the Middle East and into Western Eurasia.
The group's findings were published, open access, in Science Advances:
Copyright: © 2022 The authors. Published by American Association for the Advancement of ScienceAbstractSo, we have another fragment added to the amazing story of human evolution and how we came to dominate the major landmasses of Earth. The Camargue is one of my favourite places in Europe with its abundant wildlife, some of which is rarely seen in the rest of Europe. It is an area immensely rich in history and a culture which is a mixture of Catalan and French. It's lovely to think those of us with a European heritage owe much to the area and the beautiful Rhône Valley that played such an important part in our remote ancestry. Descendants of these early hunter-gatherers probably went on to produce the cave paintings of south-western France and northern Spain.
Determining the extent of overlap between modern humans and other hominins in Eurasia, such as Neanderthals and Denisovans, is fundamental to understanding the nature of their interactions and what led to the disappearance of archaic hominins. Apart from a possible sporadic pulse recorded in Greece during the Middle Pleistocene, the first settlements of modern humans in Europe have been constrained to ~45,000 to 43,000 years ago. Here, we report hominin fossils from Grotte Mandrin in France that reveal the earliest known presence of modern humans in Europe between 56,800 and 51,700 years ago. This early modern human incursion in the Rhône Valley is associated with technologies unknown in any industry of that age outside Africa or the Levant. Mandrin documents the first alternating occupation of Neanderthals and modern humans, with a modern human fossil and associated Neronian lithic industry found stratigraphically between layers containing Neanderthal remains associated with Mousterian industries.
Slimak, Ludovic; Zanolli, Clément; Higham, Tom; Frouin, Marine; Schwenninger, Jean-Luc; Arnold, Lee J.; Demuro, Martina; Douka, Katerina; Mercier, Norbert; Guérin, Gilles; Valladas, Hélène; Yvorra, Pascale; Giraud, Yves; Seguin-Orlando, Andaine; Orlando, Ludovic; Lewis, Jason E.; Muth, Xavier; Camus, Hubert; Vandevelde, Ségolène; Buckley, Mike; Mallol, Carolina; Stringer, Chris; Metz, Laure
Modern human incursion into Neanderthal territories 54,000 years ago at Mandrin, France
Science Advances; 8(6), eabj9496; DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abj9496
Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
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