Here lived the first Europeans

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Lepzig have analyzed the tooth together with bone fragments that were also found in the cave. The discovery is published in both journals Nature and Nature ecology and evolution.

- There are two thorough studies. Now we have an anchor point and can say that there were modern people in Europe about 46,000 years ago, says Mattias Jakobsson, professor of genetics at Uppsala University.

The dates have been made using the carbon-14 method. The researchers were also able to get mitochondrial DNA out of the tooth and a handful of bone fragments. The analysis showed that their mitochondrial DNA matches the DNA of the people of the time who lived outside Africa.  

Even today you do not know what route the modern man, Homo sapiens, took when traveling out of Africa to what is today Europe. 54,000 years ago, she left traces in today's Israel, and then migrated east to Asia.

The cave in Bulgaria now shows that she came to Europe between 44,000 - 46,000 years ago.

Then they met Neanderthals who had lived on the continent for hundreds of thousands of years.

- The discovery shows that modern man arrived in Europe much earlier than we previously thought. It is 8000 years before the last Neanderthians disappeared in the West, and it is a long time for both human species to interact, says Jean-Jacques Hublin, director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in German Leipzig, and who is the lead author of one of the studies.

The Neanderthals and the newly settled Homo sapiens had children with each other, but a few thousand years ago they disappeared. Now the Neanderthals are only left as genes in our heritage.

- We know that there were Neanderthals in Europe when modern man arrived, but they probably weren't that many. Maybe the Neanderthals were assimilated by modern people, says Mattias Jakobsson.