Shards of bone found in a German cave are transforming anthropologists’ understanding of our species’ earliest ancestors. Previously thought to have made their way to northern Europe around 38,000 BCE, the bones show that Homo sapiens reached the area 5,000 to 7,500 years sooner. Though the bones were found a few years ago, recent stable isotope analyses confirm the fragments’ age and definitively link them to Homo sapiens.
Up until now, anthropologists believed Homo sapiens made their way to northern central and northwestern Europe about 40,000 years ago. Long after evolving in Africa 300,000 years ago, Homo sapiens were thought to make their way around Earth and encounter other early humans—like Neanderthals—in parts of Europe and Asia. But Europe’s cold upper regions weren’t believed to have been explored by Homo sapiens until much later.
Although evidence of Homo sapiens’ global movements is admittedly scarce, anthropologists understood anatomically modern humans to have been accustomed to the warm African climate, making the most frigid parts of Europe difficult to penetrate. As the researchers write in a Nature Ecology & Evolution paper published Wednesday, Homo sapiens weren’t thought to have reached these cold areas until warmer climatic conditions made northern exploration favorable.
Now we know that wasn’t necessarily true. Between 2016 and 2022, an international team of paleoanthropologists re-excavated a pre-World War II dig site in Ilsenhöhle cave. Among an abundance of fox, reindeer, and bison remains, they found a number of bone fragments thought to belong to Homo sapiens. In the years following, the researchers used mitochondrial DNA analysis and bulk collagen carbon and nitrogen-stable isotope data to confirm the fragments’ origins. They found that Homo sapiens hadn’t reached northern Europe “only” 40,000 years ago, after all; instead, they landed in the area around 43,000 to 45,500 BCE.
The wide range of non-human remains and scarce evidence of fire use suggest that Homo sapiens used the cave more as a stop-in shelter than as a long-term home, with Ice Age mammals occupying the cave during their absence. (Hyenas and bears are thought to have denned and hibernated in the cave.) This is a common thread among Homo sapiens haunts from that time: When scary, sharp-toothed mammals weren’t using a cave, it was free for humans’ temporary taking. The non-human bones also indicate that Homo sapiens hunted native bovid and canine species, using them for food and possibly for protection against the elements.
At the end of their paper, the researchers assert that additional excavations among Europe’s higher latitudes could help add color to their discovery. If Homo sapiens were able to make do in regions we once thought would have been unbearable, there’s no telling where else they might have ended up without our knowledge.
