Study: Modern Humans in Europe 54000 Years Ago?
Stone artifacts and a child’s tooth found in a cave in southern France pre-date the earliest known evidence of modern humans’ arrival in Europe by thousands of years, challenging the existing scientific views on their co-habitation with Neanderthals, a team of archeologists claim in a new study published in ‘Science Advances’ on Wednesday.
Modern humans were known to have arrived in Europe from Africa around 40,000 years ago, shortly before the Neanderthals that had been living there went extinct. These facts prompted some scientists to believe that modern humans quickly overwhelmed the other species and virtually wiped them out, leading to the Neanderthals’ extinction.
Now, a team led by Professor Ludovic Slimak, a cultural anthropologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) – one of the largest fundamental science agencies in Europe – has challenged this point of view.
His team, working in a cave known as Grotte Mandrin in the Rhone Valley in southern France, discovered a tooth belonging to a child aged between 2 and 6, which dates back to around 54,000 years ago, and which they say cannot belong to a Neanderthal.
The archeologists also found thousands of stone tools, some of which closely resemble arrowheads belonging to modern humans, which had previously been found in Lebanon. These artifacts also date back to a period between 51,700 and 56,800 years ago, according to the team.
Now the team believes that modern humans occupied Grotte Mandrin for a brief period of time around 12,000 years before scientists believe the modern human species first arrived in Europe. Slimak estimates that the residency lasted for around 40 years, according to a piece published by the team in the outlet ‘Conversation’.
After one or two generations, “they disappeared just as quickly and mysteriously as they had appeared,” the team said. Neanderthals occupying the cave for thousands of years before the sudden arrival of the modern humans then “regularly reoccupied Mandrin over the following 12,000 years,” the team added.
“We are now able to demonstrate that Homo sapiens arrived 12,000 years before we expected, and this population was then replaced after that by other Neanderthal populations. And this literally rewrites all our books of history,” Slimak said, adding that the populations of modern humans and Neanderthals “must have in some way met each other.”
Now the team wants to find out if the modern humans had relations with the Neanderthals and if they exchanged information in a peaceful way. Previous studies have shown that modern humans have a small amount of Neanderthal DNA, indicating the two species did interbreed.
The news was met with interest by some scientists. Professor Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London agreed that the discovery does challenge existing scientific views.
“It wasn’t an overnight takeover by modern humans,” he told BBC News. “Sometimes Neanderthals had the advantage, sometimes modern humans had the advantage, so it was more finely balanced.”
Others, like William Banks, a Paleolithic archaeologist at the CRNS and the University of Bordeaux, remains skeptical. “It is not a stretch to think that a single Neanderthal tooth could have dental characteristics that resemble moderns,” he said, as cited by Nature, suggesting that the artifacts found in the cave might not be those of Homo sapiens.
See more here: veteranstoday.com
Please Donate Below To Support Our Ongoing Work To Defend The Scientific Method
PRINCIPIA SCIENTIFIC INTERNATIONAL, legally registered in the UK as a company 
incorporated for charitable purposes. Head Office: 27 Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX.
Trackback from your site.
Heretic Jones
| #
Gimme a break. In 2017, a 130,000 year old archeological site in California was described in the journal Nature.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature22065
Numerous publications show that modern humans were active in the Americas tens of thousands of years before Clovis. This and recent molecular data suggest that just about everything you’re taught about human origins has been a lie.
Reply
Protestant
| #
Heretic Jones, you are absolutely right to say “just about everything you’re taught about human origins has been a lie.”
Neanderthals are still here, hiding from humans who will hunt them down and put them in zoo cages. They are dismissed as legends & myths, they are called Yowies in Australia, Woodwose in England, Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Yetis, Abominable Snowmen and other names all around the world. They are real.
Reply
Alcheminister
| #
And the “humans” are indicted.
Reply
Charles Higley
| #
Ah, but they are discussing Neanderthals in Europe, not N. America. Very different thing.
Reply
Protestant
| #
No, they are NOT different. They only have different names, different myths, different physical and behavioural characteristics, just like humans. They are the same basic species, worldwide, and the Globalists know all about it, including the military in most countries.
Reply
JFK
| #
You mean existing beliefs by fake-science radicals,
Regarding the tooth, it could well be a wild boar tooth.
It’s not that we haven’t seen this before…
Regarding the so called “Neanderthals”, I see no distinction between them and the so called “modern humans”. Absolutely none. In fact, the race still exists today, and it is not just “interbred with modern humans”. Those of us that have red hair and freckles, are most likely descendants of that race. And it was a pretty advanced race. Perhaps even more advanced than modern humans that are easily fooled into injecting experimental jabs into their arms, knowing there is high risk of them dying from it…
So, tracking down Neanderthals in time is as meaningful as tracking down the Africans, or the Chinese, or the Jews. They are all modern human races. Though, for sure, Neanderthals are an older race.
Oh, and just to be clear: the existing dating methods are 100% unreliable. So the ages mentioned are totally meaningless as well.
In the end, the message of the story is that they found a tooth in Europe that appears to belong to a specific human race morphologically. So what?
Reply
Wisenox
| #
I recently watched a good documentary about Neanderthals that sheds light on the cohabitation subject. Its by DW Documentary and you can find it here, if you want to watch it:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8p8tFcIQ8K4
Reply