May 12, 2011. Copyright 2011, Graphic News. All rights reserved

The last of the Neanderthals?

LONDON, May 12, Graphic News: An ancient human toolkit discovered in Russia’s Ural Mountains is approximately 33,000 years old – yet it resembles tools made by much earlier, more primitive cultures, such as Neanderthals, researchers report.

The toolkit might be a relic from one of the last northern refuges of Neanderthals who appeared some 400,000 years ago, but who began to be replaced by more modern humans around 75,000 to 50,000 years ago. The absence of human fossils at the site makes it impossible to be sure that the tool-makers were Neanderthal, but lead-scientist Dr. Ludovic Slimak -- writing in the Friday issue of the journal Science -- says that these tools resemble Middle Paleolithic technology and are directly comparable to those typically associated with Neanderthals at older European sites.

At Byzovaya, an archaeological site in the western foothills of the Polar Urals, Slimak and his colleagues found a total of 313 human artifacts as well as the remains from mammoths and other animals.

Radiocarbon dates obtained from bones, tusks, teeth and antlers uncovered by the find indicate that the site was occupied 31,000 to 34,000 years ago, a time when Stone Age cultures occupied lower latitudes of Eurasia. Byzovaya may thus represent a late northern refuge for Neanderthals in ice age Europe.

The human artifacts consist of flakes, cores and tools, all with distinctive characteristics of Middle Paleolithic handiwork. There is no blade or bladelet technology, which has been ascribed to Upper Paleolithic cultures -- which existed until about 10,000 years ago -- to be found at the Byzovaya site.

If these tools were, in fact, made by Neanderthals, then this finding means that the two human species -- Neanderthals and more modern humans -- shared the Earth together for a longer period of time than researchers had thought. On the other hand, if the tools were struck by modern humans, then the finding implies that younger groups of Homo sapiens preserved older, traditional Middle Paleolithic cultures long after the expansion of modern, Upper Paleolithic societies around the world.
/ENDS