(CN) — The ever-growing record of human evolution reached a new milestone Wednesday when European archaeologists revealed new evidence indicating that early modern humans expanded more rapidly into northwestern Europe than previously thought.
The findings published in the journal Nature and Nature Ecology & Evolution derive from the reexcavation of the Ilsenhöhle cave in Ranis, Germany. The undertaking started roughly 78 years after German anthropologist Werner Hülle’s initial excavations, which connected the site to the Middle to Upper Paleolithic transition that occurred 47,000 to 42,000 years ago.
It is within this evolutionary period that Homo sapiens spread across Eurasia and Neanderthals disappeared from the fossil record. It is also a time that has been connected to a type of stone-tool industry or technocomplex called the Lincombian-Ranisian-Jerzmanowician or LRJ, which extended across northwestern and central Europe and is evidenced through various types of blade points.
Until Wednesday, there have been conflicting hypotheses on whether early modern humans or Neanderthals developed the LRJ, particularly since late Neanderthals lived in western Europe for thousands of years before humans arrived in Eastern Europe, and the two groups sometimes interbred. There is also evidence of many distinct cultures during the Middle to Upper Paleolithic transition, further complicating the association of behavioral adaptations between the two hominin groups.
With the excavation of new LRJ artifacts and human remains at Ilsenhöhle — the earliest Upper Paleolithic modern humans found in Eurasia, in fact — researchers were able to use mitochondrial DNA to confirm that early modern humans affiliated with the LRJ existed in central and northwestern Europe before the disappearance of late Neanderthals in southwestern Europe.
“The hypothesis that Neanderthals disappeared from northwestern Europe well before the arrival of H. sapiens — which is largely based on the chronological hiatus observed between Neanderthal-made late Middle Paleolithic assemblages and H. sapiens-made Aurignacian assemblages — can now be rejected,” the researchers write in the study.
French paleoanthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin, a professor at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, was one of 33 researchers who co-authored the analysis of the LRJ artifacts and human remains at Ilsenhöhle. However, the team’s leading revelation was not the only analysis to come of the excavation site.
Geoff Smith, a British zooarchaeologist and researcher from the University of Kent, led an accompanying analysis of bones found during the Ilsenhöhle excavation between 2016 and 2022. For that study, the researchers examined the bulk collagen carbon and nitrogen stable isotope data from 10 human remains and 52 animals, some of which included cold-terrain mammals like reindeer, bears, wholly rhinoceros and horses.
The bone study results confirmed that the site was once a cold steppe tundra setting for brief visits by small groups of pioneering humans who ate large animals.
“Combined with low artifact densities and scarce fire use, we suggest a low intensity site use by these early groups of H. sapiens and an LRJ settlement pattern dominated by short term hunting stations,” the authors write in the study, adding that the site’s low archaeological signature differs from Initial Upper Paleolithic human occupations found over 800 miles southeast at the Bacho Kiro Cave in Dryanovo, Bulgaria.
At sites like the cave in Dryanovo, the researchers note evidence of increasingly intense human occupation, the use of fire and the “specialized exploitation of carnivore carcasses and the use of bone as raw material for tools and ornaments.” The scarcity of LRJ signatures in the Ilsenhöhle cave, they say, is best explained by the small group sizes of these initial human populations.
“Their highly mobile lifestyles resulted in expedient visits of short duration at localities which are otherwise occupied by carnivores,” the authors added.
The cold climate of the Ilsenhöhle cave is further supported by a third analysis led by stable isotope archaeologist Sarah Pederzani from the Universidad de La Laguna in San Cristóbal de La Laguna, Spain.
According to Pederzani’s research — which focused on early human adaptation to different climates and habitat conditions — isotope records comparing horse and human teeth indicated that subarctic climates dominated LRJ sites and culminated in a particularly frigid period about 45,000 to 43,000 years ago.
“This shows that H. sapiens successfully operated in harsh environmental conditions during an early northward range expansion into central Europe,” the authors write.
And while direct environmental evidence from other LRJ sites is sparse, the authors note that the association of LRJ material with colder climate evidence in the United Kingdom, Germany and Poland suggests that chilly climates may have been a more common feature of LRJ than previously thought.
The analysis, the researchers conclude, “joins increasing recent evidence for a more complex patchwork of early dispersals of our species in different periods and in more diverse ecological settings than previously appreciated, raising the question of whether pioneering groups of H. sapiens may not be more accurately described as climatically resilient generalists.”
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