A team of paleoanthropologists has found the remains of the first members of our species who populated the harsh and inhospitable interior plateau of the Iberian Peninsula. These are a multitude of sharp stone knives, assegais to kill at a distance, and bones of horses and deer devoured by Homo sapiens about 33,000 years ago in La Malia, a rock shelter near the municipality of Tamajón, in Guadalajara, which currently has 148 registered inhabitants.
The new discovery helps clarify what happened at one of the most intriguing moments in the history of human evolution. About 42,000 years ago, the last Neanderthals from the interior of the Peninsula left the territory in search of warm refuges in the south. Just about 2,000 years later, this genuinely European human species, which had survived the worst ice ages imaginable for tens of thousands of years, became completely extinct. The big question is whether we sapiens had anything to do with it.
Until now, it was thought that the centre of the Peninsula was too cold and hostile a territory for the first members of our species to arrive in Iberia. The theory was that they preferred to stay in the coastal areas. The interior was thought to be completely uninhabited for 15,000 years after the disappearance of the last Neanderthals. But now a team of paleoanthropologists led by Nohemi Sala, a paleoanthropologist at the National Centre for Research on Human Evolution in Burgos, has just shown that sapiens arrived much earlier, between 36,000 and 31,000 years ago, almost a breath after the departure of the Neanderthals.
“The most significant thing is that we expanded our idea about the capabilities of our species to colonize hostile territories,” highlights the researcher. “It is also a very special moment in which the Neanderthals disappear and the Sapiens arrive,” adds the researcher. The findings show that contrary to what was thought, the interior plateau was no man’s land for much less time, and that Homo sapiens knew how to conquer it.
The remains found in Guadalajara belong to the Aurignacian culture, responsible for some of the first known works of art, such as the enigmatic man with a lion’s head carved in bone or the spectacular cave paintings of Chauvet, in France. In Malia there is no art, but there is a lot of technology for remote hunting and survival. The dating of the remains indicates that this rock shelter was inhabited at specific times for thousands of years. There is a first moment about 33,000 years ago and a second about 27,000 years ago.
In that interval, Sala explains, the center of the Peninsula changed radically. From being a relatively temperate landscape covered in forest, it became a very cold place with little vegetation. In this environment, stalking game would have been much more difficult for newcomers. Even so, the two levels of remains analyzed show that their way of life based on hunting horses and deer did not change substantially. The results of the work were published this Wednesday in Science Advances.
The new study increases the mystery of the disappearance of Neanderthals. It should not be concluded, Sala warns, that they were less adapted to their environment or that they had become accustomed to a more benign climate and that the sudden change caused their disappearance. What we do know now is that the Sapiens took much less time to occupy the void they left in the center of the peninsula. Recent DNA studies have shown that those first Aurignacian Homo sapiens who already knew how to kill from a distance and create works of art also became extinct without a trace. Then came other waves, including the one that painted the Altamira bison.
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