New archeology delves into the mysterious disappearance of Neanderthals

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

For over 350,000 years, Neanderthals inhabited Europe and Asia until, in a sudden change in evolutionary standards, they disappeared about 40,000 years ago. This was around the same time that the anatomically modern human Homo sapiens emerged from Africa.

With their characteristic sloping forehead, wide pelvis and large nose, Neanderthals left in their wake one of the great mysteries of human evolution.

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

They weren’t the only (human-like) hominid species existing on the planet at the time. Other archaic human groups such as Homo floresiensis and Denisovans also roamed the earth.

Human race

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

He is a physical anthropologist leading the Horizon-funded SUCCESS project to research the first migration of Homo sapiens to Italy. “It’s important to understand what happened,” he said.

We already know more about Neanderthals than any other extinct humans, thanks to thousands of excavated artifacts and fossils, as well as several near-complete skeletons.

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

Benazzi investigated what happened to Neanderthals in Italy around the time Homo sapiens arrived from Africa.

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

Neanderthal extinction

A number of scholars claim that climate change may have pushed Neanderthals towards extinction. While that may have been true in other places, that was not the case in Italy, Benazzi explained.

The SUCCESS project analyzed pollen from Paleolac (former lake) carrots using minerals taken from ancient stalactites. These calcium icicles hanging inside caves are actually climate time machines, and researchers can decode what the climate was like when they formed.

Using this approach, the SUCCESS project reconstructed the paleoclimate (prehistoric climate) between 40 and 60,000 years ago. Contrary to analysis of ice cores from Greenland, there was no data indicating catastrophic climate change in Italy, making the death of Neanderthals unlikely.

They looked closely at a period of about 3,000 years when populations of Neanderthals and humans were able to coexist by excavating seven sites they once occupied. They studied the cultural and tool-making differences between later Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens in Italy.

Homo sapiens in Italy used specific types of technology, including artifacts such as shell ornaments and projectiles like arrowheads. In fact, SUCCESS unearthed the earliest evidence of mechanically-launched projectile weapons in Europe.

Weapon mismatch

Neanderthals would have found themselves at a serious disadvantage compared to their Homo sapiens relatives in terms of weapon technology. However, this meeting in Italy may never have taken place.

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

Each region is different. “The result we get here (in Italy) doesn’t mean we’re going to get the same results elsewhere,” he said.

In the PALEOCHAR project, Carolina Mallol, geoarchaeologist at the University of La Laguna in Spain and currently visiting professor at UC Davis in the United States, rakes the ashes of time, in search of traces of the life of Neanderthals and d signs of their disappearance. .

fire sediments

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

“The archaeologist’s handicap is that the human world is organic and we cannot reach it,” said Mallol, who studies Neanderthal sites such as El Salt and Abric del Pastor in Spain.

When organic matter, such as meat or plants, is thrown into a fire, the heat dehydrates it, ultimately destroying its DNA and proteins. But fatty molecules called lipids can survive if the fire does not exceed around 350°C, as Mallol and his colleagues show in their research.

“PALEOCHAR was designed to explore how far we can push analytical techniques to extract molecular information from organic dark 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 are the first to apply (these techniques) in a systematic way,” she said. They also extend known lipid biomarkers, which are like molecular “barcodes” specific to species, families or even metabolic pathways.

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

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

Questions about Neanderthals, like why they died out, are very ambitious, Mallol said. “These questions require you to first figure out who they were and how they lived with a lot of information — and we don’t have that information yet,” she said.

With each new piece of information, archaeologists and scientists delve deeper into the mystery of how our closest relatives suddenly disappeared while Homo sapiens managed to survive.

The research in this article was funded by the European Research Council of the EU and this article originally appeared in Horizonthe European magazine for research and innovation.