Live Science reports:

Modern humans crossed the Alps into chilly Northern Europe about 45,000 years ago, meaning they may have coexisted with Neanderthals in Europe for thousands of years longer than experts previously thought, according to new research.

The discovery — of 13 bone fragments belonging to Homo sapiens who occupied a cave in Germany between about 44,000 and 47,500 years ago — catalogs the oldest known H. sapiens remains from Central and Northwest Europe, the researchers said. The finding also surprised the team because, as they found, the climate in the region was frigid at that time.

“This shows that even these earlier groups of Homo sapiens dispersing across Eurasia already had some capacity to adapt to such harsh climatic conditions,” Sarah Pederzani, an archaeologist at the University of La Laguna in Spain and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany who led the paleoclimate study of the site, said in a statement.

When H. sapiens arrived in Europe, they were not the first human lineage to enter the continent. Neanderthals — our closest extinct relative, which was well-adapted to the cold — occupied Europe from at least 200,000 years ago until they went extinct around 40,000 years ago.

Prior work discovered that H. sapiens entered Southwest Europe by 46,000 years ago. Much remains hotly debated about the nature of the interactions between H. sapiens and Neanderthals during this period, called the Middle-to-Upper Paleolithic transition (47,000 to 42,000 years ago), and how much our species might have sped up the Neanderthals’ demise. [Continue reading…]