Neanderthals and humans lived side by side in Northern Europe 45,000 years ago

A genetic analysis of bone fragments unearthed at an archaeological site in central Germany shows conclusively that modern humans -- Homo sapiens -- had already reached Northern Europe 45,000 years ago, overlapping with Neanderthals for several thousand years before the latter went extinct.

The findings establish that the site near Ranis, Germany, which is known for its finely flaked, leaf-shaped stone tool blades, is among the oldest confirmed sites of modern human Stone Age culture in north central and northwestern Europe.

The evidence that Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis lived side by side is consistent with genomic evidence that the two species occasionally interbred. It also feeds the suspicion that the invasion of Europe and Asia by modern humans some 50,000 years ago helped drive Neanderthals, which had occupied the area for more than 500,000 years, to extinction.

The genetic analysis, along with an archaeological and isotopic analysis and radiocarbon dating of the Ranis site, are detailed in a trio of papers appearing today in the journals Nature and Nature Ecology and Evolution.

The stone blades at Ranis, referred to as leaf points, are similar to stone tools found at several sites in Moravia, Poland, Germany and the United Kingdom. These tools that are thought to have been produced by the same culture, referred to as the Lincombian-Ranisian-Jerzmanowician (LRJ) culture or technocomplex. Because of previous dating, the Ranis site was known to be 40,000 years old or older, but without recognizable bones to indicate who made the tools, it was unclear whether they were the product of Neanderthals or Homo sapiens.

The new findings demonstrate that "Homo sapiens made this technology, and that Homo sapiens were this far north at this time period, which is 45,000 years ago," said Elena Zavala, one of four first authors of the Nature paper and a Miller Research Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. "So these are among the earliest Homo sapiens in Europe."

Zavala was a Ph.D. student at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) in Leipzig in 2018 when she first began working on the project, which was a major effort spearheaded by Jean-Jacque Hublin, former director of the institute and a professor at the Collège de France in Paris.

"The Ranis cave site provides evidence for the first dispersal of Homo sapiens across the higher latitudes of Europe. It turns out that stone artifacts that were thought to be produced by Neanderthals were, in fact, part of the early Homo sapiens toolkit," Hublin said. "This fundamentally changes our previous knowledge about the period: Homo sapiens reached northwestern Europe long before Neanderthal disappearance in southwestern Europe."

Bones from maternal relatives?

Zavala conducted the genetic analysis of hominid bone fragments from the new and deeper excavations at Ranis between 2016 and 2022 and from earlier excavations in the 1930s. Because the DNA in ancient bones is highly fragmented, she employed special techniques to isolate and sequence the DNA, all of it mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) that is inherited solely from the mother.

"We confirmed that the skeletal fragments belonged to Homo sapiens. Interestingly, several fragments shared the same mitochondrial DNA sequences -- even fragments from different excavations," she said. "This indicates that the fragments belonged to the same individual or their maternal relatives, linking these new finds with the ones from decades ago."

The bone fragments were initially identified as human through analysis of bone proteins -- a field called paleoproteomics -- by another first author, Dorothea Mylopotamitaki, a doctoral student at the Collège de France and fomerly of MPI-EVA.

By comparing the Ranis mitochondrial DNA sequences with mtDNA sequences obtained from human remains at other paleolithic sites in Europe, Zavala was able to construct a family tree of early Homo sapiens across Europe. All but one of the 13 Ranis fragments were quite similar to one another and, surprisingly, resembled mtDNA from the 43,000-year-old skull of a woman discovered in a cave at Zlatý k?? in the Czech Republic. The lone standout grouped with an individual from Italy.

"That raises some questions: Was this a single population? What could be the relationship here?" Zavala said. "But with mitochondrial DNA, that's only one side of the history. It's only the maternal side. We would need to have nuclear DNA to be able to start looking into this."

A transitional site between Middle and Upper Paleolithic

Zavala specializes in the analysis of DNA found in long-buried bones, on bone tools and in sediment. Her search through sediment from various levels of the Ranis excavation turned up DNA from a broad array of mammals, but none from hominids. The analysis, combined with morphological, isotopic and proteomic analysis of bone fragments, paints a picture of the environment at that time and of the diet of both humans and animals that occupied the cave over the millennia.

The presence of reindeer, cave bear, woolly rhinoceros and horse bones, for example, indicated cold climatic conditions typical of steppe tundra and similar to conditions in Siberia and northern Scandinavia today, and a human diet based on large terrestrial animals. The researchers concluded that the cave was used primarily by hibernating cave bears and denning hyenas, with only periodic human presence.

"This lower-density archaeological signature matches other Lincombian-Ranisian-Jerzmanowician sites and is best explained by expedient visits of short duration by small, mobile groups of pioneer H. sapiens," according to one of the papers published in Nature Ecology and Evolution.

"This shows that even these earlier groups of Homo sapiens dispersing across Eurasia already had some capacity to adapt to such harsh climatic conditions," said Sarah Pederzani, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of La Laguna in Spain, who led the paleoclimate study of the site. "Until recently, it was thought that resilience to cold-climate conditions did not appear until several thousand years later, so this is a fascinating and surprising result."

The Ranis site, called Ilsenhöhle and located at the base of a castle, was initially excavated mainly between 1932 and 1938. The leaf points found there were eventually assigned to the final years of the Middle Paleolithic period -- between about 300,000 and 30,000 years ago -- or the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic, which begins around 50,000 years ago.

Because of the importance of the Ranis site for understanding the LRJ technocomplex and the transition from the Neanderthal-associated late Middle Paleolithic to the modern human Upper Paleolithic in central Europe, Hublin and his team decided to reexcavate the site using modern tools of archaeology.

The new excavations extended to bedrock, about 8 meters below the surface, and involved removing a rock -- likely fallen from the cave ceiling -- that had halted the previous excavation. Here, Hublin's team uncovered chips from flint tools and a quartzite flake consistent with the LRJ technocomplex. Subsequent proteomic analysis of thousands of recovered bone chips confirmed that four were from hominids. Of bone chips uncovered during the 1930s excavations, nine were from hominids.

Zavala's DNA analysis confirmed that all 13 bone fragments came from Homo sapiens.

A revised settlement history of Northern Europe

The team also carried out radiocarbon dating of human and animal bones from different layers of the site to reconstruct the site's chronology, focusing on bones with traces of human modifications on their surfaces, which links their dates to human presence in the cave.

"We found very good agreement between the radiocarbon dates from the Homo sapiens bones from both excavation collections and with modified animal bones from the LRJ layers of the new excavation, making a very strong link between the human remains and LRJ. The evidence suggests that Homo sapiens were sporadically occupying the site from as early as 47,500 years ago," said another first author, Helen Fewlass, a former Max Planck researcher who is now a European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) Postdoctoral Fellow at the Francis Crick Institute in London.

"The results from the Ilsenhöhle in Ranis fundamentally changed our ideas about the chronology and settlement history of Europe north of the Alps," added Tim Schüler of the Thuringian State Office for the Preservation of Historical Monuments and Archaeology in Weimar, Germany.

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The neighbors of the caliph: Archaeologists uncover ancient mosaics on the shore of the Sea of Galilee

With the help of geomagnetic surface surveys and subsequent hands-on digging, an excavation team from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) has revealed new insights into the area in which the caliph's palace of Khirbat al-Minya was built on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. According to these findings, there had already been a settlement occupied by Christian or Jewish inhabitants in the immediate vicinity long before the palace was built.

"This time we have really hit the jackpot with our excavations," said site director and archaeologist Professor Hans-Peter Kuhnen with regard to the outcome of the most recent undertakings in the area around the early Islamic caliph's palace Khirbat al-Minya in Israel. The team of archaeologists from Mainz made this major discovery using geomagnetic methods and by digging test pits on the basis of the findings. They discovered that in the early 8th century the caliph had commissioned the building of his palace, with its incorporated mosque and a 15-meter-high gateway tower, not -- as hitherto suspected -- on greenfield land on the unoccupied shore of the Sea of Galilee, but adjacent to and respectfully co-existing with a prior settlement. The research project was initially conceived as a means of training students in archeological field work. It was undertaken with the support of the Israel Antiquities Authority and financed by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the Axel Springer Foundation, the Santander Foundation, and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). The team was accommodated in the Tabgha Pilgerhaus guesthouse run by the German Association of the Holy Land (DVHL), which has owned the site of the excavations on the northwest shore of the Sea of Galilee since 1895.

During their dig, the Mainz archaeological team found stone structures made of basalt dating to various periods, with plastered walls, colorful mosaic floors, and a water cistern. The plants portrayed in one of the mosaics are particularly remarkable as they have the long, curved stems typical of those also depicted in so-called Nile-scene mosaics created in the 5th to 6th centuries. The mosaic's images of the flora and fauna native to the Nile valley symbolized the life-giving power of the mighty river with its annual floods guaranteeing Egypt's agricultural fertility. That explains why both late-antique churches, such as that in the nearby Church of the Multiplication in Tabgha, and luxurious dwellings in cities of late antiquity were decorated with Nile-scene mosaics.

Lakeside settlement was there long before the caliph's palace was planned

The recently discovered mosaic, together with related ceramic finds dating to the 5th to 7th centuries, show that the settlement on the shores of the lake was already thriving centuries before the work on the caliph's palace had commenced. Its original inhabitants were either Christians or Jews and they were subsequently joined by a small Islamic community, for whom the caliph had a side entrance constructed in the early 8th century so that they could access his palace mosque. The unearthed ceramics have revealed that the site remained occupied under the control of the Umayyad and then Abbasid caliphates from the 7th to the 11th century. New construction projects were initiated in this period during which parts of the mosaics fell victim to pickaxes wielded by religiously inspired iconoclasts, sections of old walls were demolished, and the stones were transported away for reuse elsewhere. The remains finally became the location of a graveyard in which the dead were buried, in accordance with Muslim custom, lying on their side with their faces directed towards Mecca.

Nearby, the Mainz team also exposed a stone built furnace used to process sugar cane. Although sugar cane represented one of the top agricultural exports of the Holy Land from the period of the early Middle Ages and brought in considerable wealth for the landowners, vast volumes of water were needed to cultivate it while large amounts of wood were required to operate boiling furnaces. The result was extensive soil erosion and an environmental disaster that the area around the lake had not fully recovered from even by the 20th century. The immense scale of sugarcane cultivation in the Middle Ages was demonstrated by both the findings of the excavations at the Caliph's Palace -- those from 1936 to 1939 and those in 2016 -- and by the 2019 Mainz geomagnetic surveys, which all revealed evidence of dozens of such furnaces in operation between the 12th and 13th/14th centuries. "Our most recent excavations show that Caliph Walid had his palace built on the shore of the Sea of Galilee in an already carefully structured landscape that had long been inhabited. It was here that considerable money was subsequently made through the cultivation of sugar cane, sadly causing lasting damage to the ecosystem," said Kuhnen. "Our research has brought this settlement adjacent to the caliph's palace to light again, putting it in its rightful context among the history of human settlement of the Holy Land. Over the centuries, it experienced alternating periods of innovation and decline, but there was no real disruption to its existence during its lifetime."

Geomagnetic surface surveys showed where to dig

The Mainz-based team was able to locate this historic hotspot so accurately with its test pits due to the results of geomagnetic surface surveys conducted on-site in a pilot project in 2019. The technology employs magnetic sensors to detect and map tiny variations in the Earth's magnetic field caused by soil disturbances, for example those caused by construction work. This allows archaeologists to predict with a fair degree of confidence the course of walls and flooring and to identify the site of hearths and ovens hidden under the soil, without recourse to a spade. However, to actually verify whether magnetometry results indeed indicate the presence of something interesting and in order to date the potential structures, archaeologists need to dig targeted test pits -- as did the team from JGU's Department of Ancient Studies at Khirbat al-Minya.

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A 3400-year-old city emerges from the Tigris River

A team of German and Kurdish archaeologists have uncovered a 3400-year-old Mittani Empire-era city once located on the Tigris River. The settlement emerged from the waters of the Mosul reservoir early this year as water levels fell rapidly due to extreme drought in Iraq. The extensive city with a palace and several large buildings could be ancient Zakhiku -- believed to have been an important center in the Mittani Empire (ca. 1550-1350 BC).

Bronze Age city resurfaced due to drought

Iraq is one of the countries in the world most affected by climate change. The south of the country in particular has been suffering from extreme drought for months. To prevent crops from drying out, large amounts of water have been drawn down from the Mosul reservoir -- Iraq's most important water storage -- since December. This led to the reappearance of a Bronze Age city that had been submerged decades ago without any prior archaeological investigations. It is located at Kemune in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq.

This unforeseen event put archaeologists under sudden pressure to excavate and document at least parts of this large, important city as quickly as possible before it was resubmerged. The Kurdish archaeologist Dr. Hasan Ahmed Qasim, chairman of the Kurdistan Archaeology Organization, and the German archaeologists Jun.-Prof. Dr. Ivana Puljiz, University of Freiburg, and Prof. Dr. Peter Pfälzner, University of Tübingen, spontaneously decided to undertake joint rescue excavations at Kemune. These took place in January and February 2022 in collaboration with the Directorate of Antiquities and Heritage in Duhok (Kurdistan Region of Iraq).

Fritz Thyssen Foundation supported excavations

A team for the rescue excavations was put together within days. Funding for the work was obtained at short notice from the Fritz Thyssen Foundation through the University of Freiburg. The German-Kurdish archaeological team was under immense time pressure because it was not clear when the water in the reservoir would rise again.

Massive fortification, multi-storey storage building, industrial complex

Within a short time, the researchers succeeded in largely mapping the city. In addition to a palace, which had already been documented during a short campaign in 2018, several other large buildings were uncovered -- a massive fortification with wall and towers, a monumental, multi-storey storage building and an industrial complex. The extensive urban complex dates to the time of the Empire of Mittani (approx. 1550-1350 BC), which controlled large parts of northern Mesopotamia and Syria.

"The huge magazine building is of particular importance because enormous quantities of goods must have been stored in it, probably brought from all over the region," says Puljiz. Qasim concludes, "The excavation results show that the site was an important center in the Mittani Empire."

The research team was stunned by the well-preserved state of the walls -- sometimes to a height of several meters -- despite the fact that the walls are made of sun-dried mud bricks and were under water for more than 40 years. This good preservation is due to the fact that the city was destroyed in an earthquake around 1350 BC, during which the collapsing upper parts of the walls buried the buildings.

Ceramic vessels with over 100 cuneiform tablets

Of particular interest is the discovery of five ceramic vessels that contained an archive of over 100 cuneiform tablets. They date to the Middle Assyrian period, shortly after the earthquake disaster struck the city. Some clay tablets, which may be letters, are even still in their clay envelopes. The researchers hope this discovery will provide important information about the end of the Mittani-period city and the beginning of Assyrian rule in the region. "It is close to a miracle that cuneiform tablets made of unfired clay survived so many decades under water," Pfälzner says.

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Climate change in antiquity: Mass emigration due to water scarcity

 The absence of monsoon rains at the source of the Nile was the cause of migrations and the demise of entire settlements in the late Roman province of Egypt. This demographic development has been compared with environmental data for the first time by professor of ancient history, Sabine Huebner of the University of Basel -- leading to a discovery of climate change and its consequences.

The oasis-like Faiyum region, roughly 130 km south-west of Cairo, was the breadbasket of the Roman Empire. Yet at the end of the third century CE, numerous formerly thriving settlements there declined and were ultimately abandoned by their inhabitants. Previous excavations and contemporary papyri have shown that problems with field irrigation were the cause. Attempts by local farmers to adapt to the dryness and desertification of the farmland -- for example, by changing their agricultural practices -- are also documented.

Volcanic eruption and monsoon rains

Basel professor of ancient history Sabine R. Huebner has now shown in the US journal Studies in Late Antiquity that changing environmental conditions were behind this development. Existing climate data indicates that the monsoon rains at the headwaters of the Nile in the Ethiopian Highlands suddenly and permanently weakened. The result was lower high-water levels of the river in summer. Evidence supporting this has been found in geological sediment from the Nile Delta, Faiyum and the Ethiopian Highlands, which provides long-term climate data on the monsoons and the water level of the Nile.

A powerful tropical volcanic eruption around 266 CE, which in the following year brought a below-average flood of the Nile, presumably also played a role. Major eruptions are known from sulfuric acid deposits in ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica, and can be dated to within three years. Particles hurled up into the stratosphere lead to a cooling of the climate, disrupting the local monsoon system.

New insights into climate, environment, and society

In the third century CE, the entire Roman Empire was hit by crises that are relatively well documented in the province of Egypt by more than 26,000 preserved papyri (documents written on sheets of papyrus). In the Faiyum region, these include records of inhabitants who switched to growing vines instead of grain or to sheep farming due to the scarcity of water. Others accused their neighbors of water theft or turned to the Roman authorities for tax relief. These and other adaptive strategies of the population delayed the death of their villages for several decades.

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Researchers determine age for last known settlement by a direct ancestor to modern humans

Homo erectus skull.

Homo erectus, one of modern humans' direct ancestors, was a wandering bunch. After the species dispersed from Africa about two million years ago, it colonized the ancient world, which included Asia and possibly Europe.

But about 400,000 years ago, Homo erectus essentially vanished. The lone exception was a spot called Ngandong, on the Indonesian island of Java. But scientists were unable to agree on a precise time period for the site -- until now.

In a new study published in the journal Nature, an international team of researchers led by the University of Iowa; Macquarie University; and the Institute of Technology Bandung, Indonesia, dates the last existence of Homo erectus at Ngandong between 108,000 and 117,000 years ago.

The researchers time-stamped the site by dating animal fossils from the same bonebed where 12 Homo erectus skull caps and two tibia had been found, and then dated the surrounding land forms -- mostly terraces below and above Ngandong -- to establish an accurate record for the primeval humans' possible last stand on Earth.

"This site is the last known appearance of Homo erectus found anywhere in the world," says Russell Ciochon, professor in the Department of Anthropology at Iowa and co-corresponding author on the study. "We can't say we dated the extinction, but we dated the last occurrence of it. We have no evidence Homo erectus lived later than that anywhere else."

The research team presents 52 new age estimates for the Ngandong evidence. They include animal fossil fragments and sediment from the rediscovered fossil bed where the original Homo erectus remains were found by Dutch surveyors in the 1930s, and a sequence of dates for the river terraces below and above the fossil site.

In addition, the researchers determined when mountains south of Ngandong first rose by dating stalagmites from caves in the Southern Mountains. This allowed them to determine when the Solo River began coursing through the Ngandong site, and the river terrace sequence was created.

"You have this incredible array of dates that are all consistent," Ciochon says. "This has to be the right range. That's why it's such a nice, tight paper. The dating is very consistent."

"The issues with the dating of Ngandong could only ever be resolved by an appreciation of the wider landscape," says Kira Westaway, associate professor at Macquarie University and a joint-lead author on the paper. "Fossils are the byproducts of complex landscape processes. We were able to nail the age of the site because we constrained the fossils within the river deposit, the river terrace, the sequence of terraces, and the volcanically active landscape."

Previous research by Ciochon and others shows Homo erectus hopscotched its way across the Indonesian archipelago, and arrived on the island of Java about 1.6 million years ago. The timing was good: The area around Ngandong was mostly grassland, the same environment that cradled the species in Africa. Plants and animals were abundant. While the species continued to venture to other islands, Java, it appears, likely remained home -- or least a way station -- to some bands of the species.

However, around 130,000 years ago, the environment at Ngandong changed, and so did Homo erectus's fortunes.

"There was a change in climate," Ciochon explains. "We know the fauna changed from open country, grassland, to a tropical rainforest (extending southward from today's Malaysia). Those were not the plants and animals that Homo erectus was used to, and the species just could not adapt."

Ciochon co-led a 12-member, international team that dug at Ngandong in 2008 and in 2010, accompanied by Yan Rizal and Yahdi Zaim, the lead researchers from the Institute of Technology, Bandung, on the excavation. Using notes from the Dutch surveyors' excavation in the 1930s, the team found the original Homo erectus bone bed at Ngandong and re-exposed it, collecting and dating 867 animal fossil fragments. Meanwhile, Westaway's team had been dating the surrounding landscapes, such as the terraces, during that time.

"It was coincidental" the teams were working in the same place -- one group at the fossil bed, the other group dating the surrounding area, Ciochon says.

"With the data we had, we couldn't really date the Ngandong fossils," Ciochon continues. "We had dates on them, but they were minimum ages. So, we couldn't really say how old, although we knew we were in the ballpark. By working with Kira, who had vast amount of dating data for the terraces, mountains, and other landscape features, we were able to provide precise regional chronological and geomorphic contexts for the Ngandong site."

Researchers from multiple institutions contributed to the manuscript, including those from the Institute of Technology in Bandung, Indonesia; the University of Wollongong, Australia; the University of Texas-Austin; Griffith University in Nathan, Australia; Southern Cross University in Lismore, Australia; the University of Oxford, United Kingdom; the Geological Agency in Bandung; the University of Queensland in Brisbane Australia; the University of New England in Armidale, Australia; the University of Copenhagen in Denmark; Minnesota State University-Mankato; Bluestone Heights in Cleveland, Ohio; the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada; Rutgers University; Indiana University; and Illinois State University.

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