There’s a lot of domain terminology that’s fairly opaque to non-specialists. Anyone care to take a stab at summarizing the revelation for us lay-people?
Humans and Neanderthals were neighbours for longer than previously thought. Also, we’re maybe back to humans making more tools.
…the discovery of more of its remnants alongside human fossils points to Homo sapiens inhabiting central Germany at the same time.
“It turns out that stone artefacts that were thought to be produced by Neanderthals were in fact part of the early Homo sapiens tool kit,” says Jean-Jacques Hublin, a professor in palaeoanthropology at Collège de France.
“This fundamentally changes our previous knowledge about this time period: Homo sapiens reached northwestern Europe long before Neanderthal disappearance in southwestern Europe.”
Is there more?
Basically they revisited a former excavation site and found new evidence, tools and human fossils, that suggests Homo Sapiens arrived a fair bit earlier in the region than previously assumed, extending the time Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals lived there simultaneously. They also found tools that were previously, due to their age, attributed to the Neanderthals and could now be identified as part of the Homo Sapiens toolkit. All in all it rewrites part of our species history during that time, especially its migration into europe.
