What a 45,000-year-old pit of bones reveals about our earliest human ancestors
Inside a cave beneath a medieval German castle, researchers have discovered a pit of bones that they say unlock secrets of the earliest humans.
Inside a cave beneath a medieval German castle, researchers have discovered a pit of bones that they say unlock secrets of the earliest humans.
The remains — buried in layers of soil in the collapsed cave — included the genetic material of cave bears, hyenas and 13 bones of early humans who died 45,000 years ago.
The findings — which were described in a trio of papers published Thursday in the journals Nature and Nature Ecology & Evolution — show that early humans ventured farther north earlier than scientists had realized, that they could craft spear-shaped tools and that they then had the wherewithal to thrive in temperatures far more frigid than the climate today.
The discoveries, which were made possible because of the development of new DNA technology, are reshaping how scientists understand the time when both humans and Neanderthals walked the European continent.
“Because of the age of this site and location, we know Neanderthals and humans quite definitively had a large overlap,” said Elena Zavala, a paleo and forensic geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley, who helped author the three studies. The species most likely roamed the same geography for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years.
Rating: 5