Central Europe
Central Europe has been a source of many fossil finds, including the earliest anatomically modern H. sapiens yet discovered anywhere in Europe. Dated to 35,000 ya, these early H. sapiens fossils come from recent discoveries at the Oase Cave, in Romania . Here, cranial remains of three individuals were recovered, including a complete mandible and a partial skull .
While quite robust, these individuals are similar to later modern specimens, as seen in the clear presence of both a chin and a canine fossa (see Fig. 12-3; Trinkaus et al., 2003).
Another early modern human site in central Europe is Mladec˘, in the Czech Republic. Several individuals have been excavated here and are dated to approximately 31,000 ya. While there’s some variation among the crania, including some with big browridges, Fred Smith (1984) is confident that they’re all best classified as modern H. sapiens . It’s clear that by 28,000 ya, modern humans were widely dispersed in central and western Europe (Trinkaus, 2005). Also from the Czech Republic and dated at about 26,000 ya, Dolní Vestonice provides another example of a central European early modern human .
Western Europe
For several reasons, western Europe and its fossils have received more attention than other regions. Over the last 150 years, many of the scholars doing this research happened to live in western Europe, and the southern region of France also turned out to be a fossil treasure trove.
As a result of this scholarly interest, a great deal of data accumulated beginning back in the nineteenth century, with little reliable comparative information available from elsewhere in the world. Consequently, theories of human evolution were based almost exclusively on the western European material. It’s only been in more recent years, with growing evidence from other areas of the world and with the application of new dating techniques, that recent human evolutionary dynamics are being seriously considered from a worldwide perspective.
Western Europe has yielded many anatomically modern human fossils, but by far the best-known sample of western European H. sapiens is from the CroMagnon site, a rock-shelter in southern France. At this site, the remains of eight individuals were discovered in 1868.
The Cro-Magnon materials are associated with an Aurignacian tool assemblage, an Upper Paleolithic industry. Dated at about 28,000 ya, these individuals represent the earliest of France’s anatomically modern humans. The socalled Old Man (Cro-Magnon 1) became the original model for what was once termed the Cro-Magnon, or Upper Paleolithic, “race” of Europe .
Actually, of course, there’s no such valid biological category, and Cro-Magnon 1 is not typical of Upper Paleolithic western Europeans—and not even all that similar to the other two male skulls found at the site.
Most of the genetic evidence, as well as the newest fossil evidence from Africa, argue against continuous local evolution producing modern groups directly from any Eurasian premodern population (in Europe, these would be Neandertals). Still, for some researchers, the issue isn’t completely settled.
With all the latest evidence, there’s no longer much debate that a large genetic contribution from migrating early modern Africans influenced other groups throughout the Old World. What’s being debated is just how much admixture might have occurred between these migrating Africans and the resident premodern groups. For those paleoanthropologists (for example, Trinkaus, 2005) who hypothesize that significant admixture (assimilation) occurred in western Europe as well as elsewhere, a recently discovered child’s skeleton from Portugal provides some of the best skeletal evidence of possible interbreeding between Neandertals and anatomically modern H. sapiens. This important discovery from the Abrigo do Lagar Velho site was excavated in late 1998 and is dated to 24,500 ya—that’s at least 5,000 years more recent than the last clearly identifiable Neandertal fossil . Associated with an Upper Paleolithic industry and buried with red ocher and pierced shell is a fairly complete skeleton of a 4-year-old child (Duarte et al., 1999). In studying the remains, Cidália Duarte, Erik Trinkaus, and colleagues found a highly mixed set of anatomical features. From this evidence they concluded that the young child was the result of inter-breeding between Neandertals and modern humans, thus supporting a partial replacement model of human origins. It’s still debatable from this fossil evidence whether interbreeding with Neandertals took place in Portugal this late in time.
Nevertheless, the genetic evidence is unequivocal: Neandertals and modern humans did interbreed at some point.