Homo Sapiens in southern Europe, ~44-46K years ago?

[Astronuc]

An international team of archaeologists exploring the Bacho Kiro (Бачо Киро) cave in Bulgaria since 2015 determined that a molar (tooth) the found is dated to about 44,000-46,000 years old.

“This is much older than anything else that we have found so far from modern humans in Europe,” said Jean-Jacques Hublin, a paleoanthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology at Leipzig in Germany, who led the team.

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/sci...ed-europe-earlier-previously-thought-n1204401

Evidence from other sites suggests the people at Bacho Kiro cave were part of a “pioneer” wave of Homo sapiens that entered southern and central Europe up to 47,000 years ago from southwest Asia, Hublin said.

Before this, the oldest confirmed find of Homo sapiens remains in Europe were from Peştera cu Oase in Romania, and dated to around 41,000 years ago.

Article in Nature - Initial Upper Palaeolithic Homo sapiens from Bacho Kiro Cave, Bulgaria
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2259-z

An early modern human from the Peştera cu Oase, Romania
https://www.pnas.org/content/100/20/11231

Bacho Kiro is about halfway between Sofiya and Varna in the Balkan Mountains near the town of Veliko Tarnovo (Велико Търново). It is north of Kazanluk (Казанлък) and Stara Zagora (Стара Загора). The area has a rich archeological history.

 

[Astronuc]

Humans and Neanderthals May Have Overlapped in Europe Longer Than Previously Thought
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smar...d-europe-longer-previously-thought-180974857/

The article is related to first on the in the OP. I was reading another article about Homo Sapiens and Neanderthal but in what is now western Europe, I believe France, which made me think that there were separate migration paths of Homo sapiens, a western one from N. Africa (Morocco and Algeria) through the Iberian peninsula and an eastern one through Turkey and the Balkan region.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal
https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils/species/homo-neanderthalensis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_sapiens
https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils/species/homo-sapiens

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_early_modern_humans

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_human_migrations ??

https://www.ancient.eu/article/1070/early-human-migration/

 

[Astronuc]

In 2021, Smithsonian published the following update on Bacho Kiro.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/scie...-humans-revealed-genome-sequencing-180977437/

Two genetic sequencing studies published in different journals this week have sketched out the family trees of Europe’s earliest known modern humans, three 45,000-year-old individuals from Bacho Kiro Cave and one similarly aged skull from a Czechian hill site known as Zlatý kůň (Golden Horse). Only the Bacho Kiro individuals have living descendants and they’re found in surprising places—in East Asia and the Americas. The ancient humans from both ancient European sites do share one common ancestral strain—a healthy dose of Neanderthal DNA. Among the Bacho Kiro humans, evidence seems to show that when modern humans moved into Europe they commingled with Neanderthals longer, and later, than is commonly believed.

“Interestingly, these earliest Europeans that we find in the Bacho Kiro Cave did not contribute substantially to later West Eurasians,” says Mateja Hajdinjak, of the Francis Crick Institute (London), co-author of the study published this week in Nature. “These groups got largely replaced in Western Eurasia by subsequent migrations of people. But they are closely related to the human groups that gave rise to later East Eurasians and Americans—including present-day populations.”“It’s just really cool that fossils of three individuals in Bulgaria left behind DNA, and can trace their descendants to different parts of the world than we’d expect, in ancient and living East Asians and Native peoples of the Americas,” adds Rick Potts, director of the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program, who wasn’t involved in the genetic research.

I notice a recycled photo. Nevertheless, interesting information.

Related article in Nature, Initial Upper Palaeolithic humans in Europe had recent Neanderthal ancestry
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03335-3

A genome sequence from a modern human skull over 45,000 years old from Zlatý kůň in Czechia
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-021-01443-x