The original homeland of Homo sapiens is Africa.
From there, this prosperous offspring of the human family tree has spread to the Middle East and southern Asia.
It also arrived in Australia about 65,000 years ago.
Until now, it seemed that Europe was not settled by Homo sapiens until 43,000 to 45,000 years ago.
It is understandable that the frosty steppe areas that shaped Central Europe during the last cold period had a rather deterrent effect.
However, an international team of researchers has discovered that in southern Europe, representatives of our species were actually present around ten thousand years earlier.
Corresponding finds come from the mandrin cave not far from the French town of Malataverne in the Rhone Valley.
The three meter thick layers of sediment that have accumulated over the course of more than 40
000 years ago deposited on the cave floor testify to a popular accommodation.
The archaeologists led by Ludovic Slimak from the Université de Toulouse unearthed almost 60,000 flint objects and more than 70,000 presumed remains of hunting prey, mainly horses, bison and deer.
Also human teeth, mostly milk teeth.
These teeth come almost exclusively from Neanderthals.
However, Slimak and his colleagues were able to clearly assign a child's molar tooth to Homo sapiens.
It lay in a layer of sediment that has been radiocarbon dated to be approximately 54,000 years old.
In addition to the small milk tooth, our species also left a variety of flint blades and points there as evidence of their presence.
Some of them in miniature format of only one centimeter and all shaped very differently from stone tools of the Neanderthals.
The range of Homo sapiens also differs from their products, which were recovered from the next older sediment layer, in the raw material used.
The fact that the finds from the mandrin cave include all production steps suggests local production.
Apparently the shelter also served as a workshop.
In manufacturing technique, the blades and points are similar to those found at an - albeit more recent - archaeological site called Ksar Akil in Lebanon.
It is possible that people who left samples of their craftsmanship in the Rhone Valley around 54,000 years ago followed a craft tradition that their ancestors had once developed in the eastern Mediterranean region.
Whether Homo sapiens were able to gain a permanent foothold in southern Europe as immigrants at that time remains questionable.
As the researchers report in the journal Science Advances, our species only briefly occupied the stylet cavity.
Typical stone tools testify to the fact that Neanderthals immediately spread out there again.
It was only around 43,000 years ago that Homo sapiens took over the accommodation with a view over the Rhone Valley.
A similarly dated site is also known from Bulgaria, and several from Italy.
Arriving at the middle Rhone, our species was well on its way to advance further north into the cold steppes of Central Europe.
A temporarily warmer phase around 42,000 years ago may have favored this migration.
In the traditional terrain of the Neanderthals, who had defied the cold period from the start in the company of mammoths and woolly rhinos, the immigrants also learned to cope with the frosty climate.
At the expense of the Neanderthal.
This human species then soon disappeared from the scene.
Not quite, however, because occasionally Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis have fathered offspring together.
In this way, the Neanderthals, who originated in Europe, were able to leave traces to this day: in Europeans and Asians, up to two percent of the human genome turned out to be inherited from the Neanderthals.