Did Homo sapiens (left) and Neanderthals have shared culture?S.PLAILLY/E.DAYNES/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
About 59,000 years ago, Homo sapiens moved into a coastal cave in Turkey that was previously home to Neanderthals. Yet the tools and trinkets found in the cave remained remarkably consistent, hinting that these ancient hominin species had a shared material culture.
Situated on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, Üçağızlı II cave is a 56-square-metre space, about the size of a city studio apartment.
Naoki Morimoto at Kyoto University, Japan, and his colleagues carried out the first full archaeological dig at the site in 2020. Teeth and jaw remains revealed that Neanderthals inhabited the cave from 77,000 to 59,000 years ago and our species, Homo sapiens, from 59,000 to 47,000 years ago.
Altogether, nearly 20,000 stone artefacts were also recovered from the cave. But, surprisingly, the stone-tool technology used by the two human species and the objects they collected remained extraordinarily consistent throughout the entire period. This raises the possibility that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens co-existed for a while.
