The ancient bones found in the Bulgarian cave are the oldest evidence of modern humans in Europe

The oldest bones of Homo sapiens Never found in Europe, they were discovered in a Bulgarian cave, providing the first known evidence of the appearance of our species on the European continent, according to new research.

The emergence and spread of modern humans in Europe is a difficult timeline for researchers to reconstruct, due to the scarcity of sufficiently ancient remains that have been identified in the fossil record.

However, when modern humans first appeared, our arrival finally sealed the fate of the native Neanderthals who called Europe to our home before we quickly replaced them over the next thousands of years.

Stone objects from the early Upper Paleolithic in the Bacho Kiro cave. (Tsenka Tsanova, MPI-EVA Leipzig, CC-BY-SA 2.0)

Now, the timeline of this mysterious transition during the Early Upper Paleolithic period came to a clearer vision, thanks to the discovery and dating of H. sapiens

the remains and other artifacts buried deep in an archaeological site called Bacho Kiro Cave in the center of Bulgaria, located at the foot of the Balkans.

Bacho Kiro is known to be a rich deposit of Paleolithic fossils, with a series of excavations which took place in the 20th century, some of which, during the 1970s, produced fragmentary human remains which were lost later, explain the researchers in a new role.

In 2015, excavations began on the site, and the excavation dumped a layer of sediment containing what appears to be the oldest human remains of our migrant ancestors ever identified in Europe, not that there have a lot of family resemblance to choose from. easily.

"Most of the Pleistocene bones are so fragmented that at first glance it cannot be said which animal species they represent." said human evolution researcher Frido Welker from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.

In fact, among the human remains detected, only one tooth could be determined from a physical examination that as belonging to modern humans.

But using a mass spectrometry technique called ZooMS to find matching protein sequences H. sapiens From hundreds of unidentified bone and tooth fragments, the researchers obtained five results dating back to the early Upper Paleolithic.

Using a combination of methods that integrate radiocarbon dating and mitochondrial DNA sequencing to estimate the age of the fossils, the researchers suggest that these ancient humans probably occupied the cave about 45,820 to 43,650 years, although some of the remains have been found. up to 46,940 years.

"Consequently, to our knowledge, these bones represent the oldest hominins of the European Paleolithic recovered to date", explain the authors in a of of them New documents describing the results.

(Rosen Spasov and Geoff Smith, MPI-EVA Leipzig, CC-BY-SA 2.0)

Sure: Personal ornaments and bone tools from the Bacho Kiro cave, on the left, with similar objects from the Reindeer Cave in France, on the right.

In addition to human remains, the researchers also discovered a wide variety of stone tools, as well as bone artefacts from 23 different animal species, including pendant-shaped pieces made from the teeth of teeth. cave bear, recalling known designs. this happened later. by the Neanderthals in what we now call France.

It is likely, according to the researchers, that over thousands of years, the interactions between H. sapiens and the Neanderthals could have influenced these, giving them inspiration for fashion items and technologies like this.

"Regardless of the cognitive complexity of recent Neanderthals, the earliest age of the material in the Bacho Kiro cave supports the idea that these specific behavioral novelties observed in the decline of Neanderthal populations were the result of contacts with migrants H. sapiens" the authors write.

Others may disagree with this assumption, but it is clear that the results as a whole, as well as the new dating methods used, help us to give ourselves a more complete picture of what this point looked like. prehistoric change.