New archeology delves into the mysterious demise of the Neanderthals

Chars from ancient fires and stalagmites in caves hold clues to the mysterious disappearance of Neanderthals from Europe.

Neanderthals inhabited Europe and Asia for more than 350,000 years before disappearing in a sudden change in evolutionary terms around 40,000 years ago. This was around the same time that anatomically modern human Homo sapiens emerged from Africa.

With their distinctive sloping foreheads, large pelvis and broad noses, the Neanderthals leave behind one of the great mysteries of human evolution.

They lived in the middle to late Pleistocene about 400,000 to 40,000 years ago. Neanderthals lived in Eurasia, with traces found as far south as modern-day Belgium and as far south as the Mediterranean and Southwest Asia.

They were not the only hominid (human-like) species that existed on the planet at the time. Other archaic human groups such as Homo floresiensis and Denisovans also inhabited Earth.

human species

‘At the time of the Neanderthals there were several human species and suddenly 40,000 years ago all but one disappeared,’ said Prof Stefano Benazzi of the University of Bologna, Italy.

He is a physical anthropologist who leads the Horizon-funded SUCCESS project to study the earliest migration of Homo sapiens in Italy. “It’s important to understand what happened,” he said.

Thanks to thousands of artifacts and fossils unearthed, as well as several nearly complete skeletons, we already know more about Neanderthals than about any other extinct human.

There are a number of competing theories as to why the Neanderthals disappeared, such as B. climate change, the aggression of Homo sapiens, possible competition for resources or even that Neanderthals disappeared because they interbred with Homo sapiens. Some human populations living in Europe and Asia today have up to 3% Neanderthal DNA.

Benazzi studied what was happening to Neanderthals in Italy around the time Homo sapiens arrived from Africa.

“In Italy we have many (dated) archaeological sites and we have a good overview of the different (technological) cultures that fall within the period of interest,” he said.

Neanderthals extinct

A number of scientists argue that climate change may have driven the Neanderthals to extinction. While that may have been true elsewhere, it wasn’t the case in Italy, Benazzi explained.

The SUCCESS project analyzed the pollen from Paleolake cores (ancient lakes) using minerals collected from ancient stalactites. Hanging in caves, these calcium icicles are effectively climate time machines, and researchers can decipher what the climate was like when they formed.

Through this approach, the SUCCESS project reconstructed the paleoclimate (prehistoric climate) 40-60 000 years ago. Contrary to ice core analyzes from Greenland, there was no data in Italy that suggested catastrophic climate change, making it unlikely that the Neanderthals were wiped out.

They examined a period of about 3,000 years during which populations of Neanderthals and humans may have coexisted by excavating seven sites where they once lived. They examined the cultural and tool-making differences between the last Neanderthals and the first Homo sapiens in Italy.

Homo sapiens in Italy used certain types of technology, including artifacts like shell jewelry and projectiles like arrowheads. In fact, SUCCESS has unearthed the earliest evidence of mechanically delivered projectile weapons in Europe.

Weapons don’t match

In terms of weaponry, Neanderthals would have been at a serious disadvantage compared to their Homo sapiens relatives. However, this meeting in Italy may never have taken place.

Recent remains discovered in southern Europe show that at least one Neanderthal lived 44,000 years ago, while the oldest remains of Homo sapiens have been dated to 43,000 years. It’s possible they overlapped, but none of the current evidence shows that, Benazzi said.

Every region is different. “The result we get here (in Italy) doesn’t mean that we will get the same results elsewhere,” he said.

In the PALEOCHAR project, Carolina Mallol, a geoarchaeologist at La Laguna University in Spain and currently visiting professor at UC Davis in the United States, is combing through the ashes of time in search of traces of Neanderthal life and clues to their demise.

burn sediments

The goal is to study microscopic and molecular charred matter from ancient fire sediments to see what organic material they left behind.

“The archaeologist’s handicap is that the human world is organic and we can’t get to it,” said Mallol, who studies Neanderthal sites like El Salt and Abric del Pastor in Spain.

When organic material like meat or plants is thrown into the fire, the heat dehydrates it and ultimately destroys its DNA and proteins. But fat molecules, so-called lipids, can survive if the fire does not get hotter than around 350 °C, as Mallol and colleagues show in their studies.

“PALEOCHAR was designed to investigate how far we can push the analytical techniques to squeeze molecular information out of the organic black layers (in the fire),” she said.

Paleolipidomics (the study of ancient fats) has been used to study lipids in Roman amphorae, Egyptian mummies, and even prehistoric leaves.

Biomarker Library

When it comes to ancient human sediments, “we’re the first to apply (these techniques) in a systematic way,” she said. They also extend the known lipid biomarkers that are specific to species, families or even metabolic pathways like molecular “barcodes”.

“With biomarkers, you can tell herbivores from carnivores, conifers from angiosperms,” ​​she said.

Mallol and colleagues founded the world’s first AMBILAB, which stands for Archaeological Micromorphology and Biomarkers Research Lab, based in Tenerife, Spain, which trains researchers in the techniques of soil micromorphology and lipid biomarker analysis.

The questions about the Neanderthals, such as why they became extinct, are very ambitious, said Mallol. “These questions require you to first establish who they were and how they lived with a lot of information — and we don’t have that information yet,” she said.

With each piece of new information, archaeologists and scientists dig deeper into the mystery of why our closest relatives suddenly disappeared while Homo sapiens survived.

The research in this article was funded by the EU’s European Research Council and this article was originally published in horizonthe EU magazine for research and innovation.