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Archaeologists identified bone fragments of prehistoric modern humans in Germany, suggesting several millennia of coexistence with Neanderthals before the species disappeared
Modern humans had already settled in northwest Europe thousands of years before Neanderthals vanished forever in the southwest of the continent, according to the results of a recent excavation in Ranis, Germany. The new findings offer unprecedented insight into the two species’ interaction, suggesting they lived side by side and might have even interbred.
At the base of a medieval castle, 24 feet deep into the layered sediment of the Ilsenhöhle cave, scientists unearthed leaf-shaped spear points, animal remains and 13 bone fragments identified as early modern humans—evidence that Homo sapiens existed in northern Europe 45,000 years ago.
“Because of the age of this site and location, we know Neanderthals and humans quite definitively had a large overlap,” says study co-author Elena Zavala, a paleo and forensic geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley, to NBC News’ Evan Bush.
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We still do in the U.S., just look at the polls.
Hey, don’t do Neanderthals dirty like that. Things point to them being pretty smart.
Definitely interbred… I know some of the descendants
Every five years the date of the earliest homo sapiens is pushed back five thousand years. They’ll be saying that homo sapiens were writing novels in 200,000 BC by the time I die.
So that’s another tick in the box for “we may have accidentally fucked them into extinction.”
Apparently the Halo effect is as much an evolutionary edge as it is a frustrating theory of societal treatment of its members.
