Who made stone tools 45,000 years ago?

Currently there is only one species of human in the world: Homo Sapiens. However, for millions of years, before modern humans spread across the five continents, Many species of hominins lived on Earth. With the migration of Homo sapiens around the world 100,000–60,000 years ago, they were all replaced and disappeared.

Thanks to the study of ancient DNA, we can confirm that Human populations spread from Africa throughout EurasiaPossibly through the Middle East, and partially absorbed or replaced archaic human species such as Neanderthals or Denisovans present on this continent.

Both groups of archaic humans evolved in Eurasia separately from African populations., from which they diverged more than 600,000 years ago. Neanderthals in western Eurasia and Denisovans in central and eastern Asia. Both lived on this continent several million years before the arrival of Homo sapiens.

Neanderthals or Sapiens?

What is the transition from the Middle to the Upper Palaeolithic in Europe (47,000 to 42,000 years before present) associated with? The expansion of Homo Sapiens and the extinction of the Neanderthalswhich persisted in Western Europe for several millennia after the arrival of modern humans in the east of the continent.

Human remains are not very frequent in the fossil record of Europe from this period, but are Stone tools from different cultures are abundantWhich complicates the explanation as to which human group built them.

One of these lithic industries (or technocomplexes), whose creators are unknown, is the Lincombian-Ranician-Gerzmanovician (LRJ), which we find in central and north-western Europe, from present-day Poland to the British Isles. LRJ It shares characteristics with Neanderthal tools, while others represent a clear innovation. Until now it was believed that this ‘transitional culture’ was the work of Neanderthals who lived in northern Europe for a long time, shortly before the arrival of Homo sapiens.

Several sites from this period in Germany, France and the United Kingdom were excavated between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. unfortunately, The archaeological techniques used destroyed them and some have been preserved to be able to be analyzed again.

An exception is the Ilsenhöhle Cave in Rhenish (Germany)., the municipality from which the word ‘Ranisian’ comes in the name of the LRJ culture. The site is an ancient cave that collapsed and, although it was studied in the 1930s, it contains some areas that have not been excavated that have been preserved.

Initial excavations at Ranis did not find any human remains at the LRJ level. to try to Solve who made stone tools LRJ, a microscopic work led by paleontologist Jean-Jacques Hublin and recently published in ‘Nature’, has re-excavated the site and managed to identify 13 human bone fragments at the LRJ level, which have been The age is about 45,000 years. The fragments represent the first human fossils associated with LRJ devices.

from bone remains, Ancient DNA experts were able to extract mitochondrial DNA, which was surprisingly very well preserved. Sequencing of this DNA revealed that it was Homo sapiens mitochondrial DNA. All the sequences obtained match and, therefore, the most plausible explanation is that it was members of our species who made the LRJ stone tools.

Therefore, there will be LRJ tools and possibly many other so-called ‘transitional’ cultures Examples of tools made by the first groups of Sapiens to enter Europe, an area until then inhabited exclusively by Neanderthals. This new technology replaced the most primitive tools that characterized the Middle Palaeolithic period in Europe.

The replacement of Neanderthals by Homo sapiens did not happen overnight. The oldest Sapiens specimens in Ranis would be over 47,000 years old (as this is the minimum age of the LRJ stratum). There were still Neanderthals in southern Europe at that time.

looking for a needle in a haystack

In contrast to the excavations of the 1930s, which discovered only archaeological remains such as tools or paleontological remains such as bones of hominins and related organisms, Nowadays, molecular techniques are available that allow us to extract much more information from a site. Excavations also attempt to preserve the context that provides very valuable data to understand how our ancestors lived.

Complete remains were not found at the Rani site, but several bone fragments were found. Analysis of over a thousand of them from the LRJ level, from both initial excavations of the site and the most recent expedition, The researchers managed to identify fragments of 13 human bones.

To find a human bone among hundreds of other animal bones, they also looked at its shape. Modern proteomics and mass spectrometry techniques were usedWith which scientists study the ancient proteins – mainly collagen – present in the bone remains to find out which animal they belong to.

Bone fragments identified as Homo sapiens This is directly related to radiocarbon technology about 45,000 years old, And thanks to the technique of stable oxygen isotopes applied to the horses’ teeth, it was possible to determine that humans in Queens at that time had to deal with a cold climate, which was 7 to 15 degrees colder than today.

First incursion into Neanderthal territory

One of the questions facing paleoanthropologists is to determine When the Neanderthal populations of Eurasia disappeared and when anatomically modern humans arrived. It is necessary to establish what were the interactions between these groups and what were the reasons for the extinction of archaic humans.

The results of skeletal remains found at the Ranis site in Germany indicate that 45,000 years ago, pioneer groups of Homo sapiens entered the high latitudes of Europe and spread rapidly., perhaps even as far as the present-day British Isles. This expansion occurred long before our species reached the southwest of the continent, where Neanderthal presence was recorded at least 42,000 years ago.

The remains of Zlaty Kun’s wife have been found in the Czech Republic from the same period, which according to genetic estimates would be about 45,000 years old, and which It shares the same mitochondrial DNA as the queen’s remains.

The Zlaty Kun may have been part of the first group of modern humans to reach Eurasia after the expansion of Homo sapiens from Africa. Its genome contains about 3% Neanderthal DNA, similar to other Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherers. This woman came from an ancestral population of Sapiens that mixed with Neanderthals About 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, probably in the Near East.

Apart from Ranis and Zlati Kun, the earliest evidence of H. sapiens settlement in Europe comes from the Italian sites of Grotta Cavallo, Riparo Bombrini and Grotta di Fumane, where they have been found. Isolated dental remains dated to 43,000–45,000 years ago. On the other hand, the last Neanderthal remains are 40,000 to 42,000 years old and their Mousterian stone tools disappeared 39,000–41,000 years ago.

This evidence points to In Europe, pioneer groups of Homo sapiens expanded 3,000 to 5,000 years before Neanderthals disappeared from the fossil record.

It is also possible that some groups of Sapiens may have entered Europe a few millennia ago. An infant’s tooth, whose DNA could not be analyzed, has been found in the Grotte Mandrin in the Rhone Valley in France, suggesting that The appearance of our species in the south of France about 54,000 years ago. This would predate the oldest Sapiens remains found in Europe by about 10,000 years.

The tooth was identified with stone tools that resembled other tools found in Africa and the Near East of the same period, and is located between one level of the site (56,800 and 51,700 years old), which is between two layers of sediment. Located between the layers. Neanderthals associated with Mousterian tools. mandarin site will be The first example of a cave that was occupied alternately by Neanderthals and modern humans.

For many millennia, both human groups may have co-existed on the continent.E: Small groups of Sapiens, probably in more inaccessible habitats on the periphery of Neanderthal territory, and the latter gradually moved southward, their last remains in the Iberian Peninsula. Unless new migrations of Sapiens in greater numbers replaced them forever.

Neanderthal DNA in our cells

In 2010, the Neanderthal genome was sequenced for the first time from DNA obtained from the remains of three individuals from Vindija Cave in Croatia, who lived between 44,000 and 47,000 years ago. The Neanderthal genome, a milestone in paleogenomics Svante Pääbo, the leader of the study, received the Nobel Prize in 2022, which included a surprise.

Current inhabitants of Eurasia contain between 1.8 and 2.6% Neanderthal DNA in the human genome. According to the latest estimates, and this proportion is higher in Eastern Asia (2.3–2.6%) than in Western Eurasia (1.8–2.4%). So, at some point in the past, Neanderthals and Sapiens interbred with each other and mixed-race children of a Sapien mother and a Neanderthal father came into the world, or vice versa.

it is estimated that These interactions occurred outside Africa between 65,000 and 47,000 years ago.Where the geographical areas of both species coincided, possibly in the Middle East or Europe.

Most of us carry in our cells the DNA of a species of humans that became extinct several tens of thousands of years ago. If we add up the various fragments of Neanderthal DNA present in present-day populations, it appears that 20 to 30% of the Neanderthal genome survives in the modern human gene pool. In recent years, the Neanderthal DNA content of our genome has been related to various characteristics, such as, for example, immune response to new pathogens, skin pigmentation levels or fat accumulation. The fact that some people like to wake up early can also be attributed to Neanderthal genes.

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