Researchers suggest humans and Neanderthals communicated, and even introduced tools to one another.
Deep in southern France, near the small town of Malataverne, is a limestone cave called Grotte Mandrin. And it has housed Neanderthal and human history for over 100,000 years. As more of a shelter, the cave withstood the hands of time because of its location. The mistral — a famous French northwesterly wind that blows in each winter from the Gulf of Lion — has covered the cave with layers of dust, frozen in time to preserve what lies beneath.
. Researchers distinguished the Neanderthal and human remains from each other using the structural morphology of their teeth. And they uncovered the exact timing of human incursion based on soot from the roof of the cave.“Using innovative technology, we were able to distinguish when the last Neanderthal and the first human fires were built in the cave,” says Slimak.
Each time period has a unique thickness in the barcode, allowing archeologists to learn when each fire occurred. It’s the same way researchers can drill into a tree and obtain its date using the tree’s rings. They can also use the unique layers of soot to date human and Neanderthal inhabitation. Slimak says his team used the same computer software that a dendrologist would use to study the age of a tree.
Humans only inhabited the cave for 40 years, or one human lifetime. It seems unlikely they would have known all the information that the Neanderthals knew without some sort of interaction. Neanderthals likely provided information about the territory to humans who had come from elsewhere.
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