It wasn’t a handover ceremony. No grand交接 of power in 59,000 BCE Turkey.
Just Homo sapiens walking into a cave. Üçağızlı II, specifically. A cramped 56 square meters on the Mediterranean coast. About the size of your city studio if your city is grim. Before us? Neanderthals. They had been hanging out there from 77,000 down to 59,002 years ago maybe.
Then we arrived.
We stayed until 47,000. Naoki Morimoto from Kyoto University finally dug the whole place out in 2020 teeth and jawbones didn’t lie about who was where.
But here is the weird part.
20,000 stone tools turned up. You’d expect a shift. New hands new tricks. Different aesthetic. But the lithic tech stayed exactly the same. Across the entire timeline. Boring, you might say. Or strikingly consistent. Morimoto prefers the latter.
The tools weren’t the only thing. It was the trinkets.
- Columbella rustica. Small. Pretty sea snails.
30 of them. Scattered through every layer. Left by the Neanderthals left by us.
No food value. No tool function. Just… kept. Some had holes, maybe for necklaces. Most were just left intact. Why? We don’t know. Both species apparently looked at this specific snail shell and said “yes”.
“This strong preference suggests that both human shared a common cultural evaluation”
Morimoto isn’t saying we high-fived the Neanderthals in the dark. He says we can’t prove physical overlap. Not yet. But he is exploring that hypothesis. It fits too well for independent evolution to explain it.
John Gowlett thinks this solves part of the 200,00 year puzzle. For millennia, modern humans in the south and Neanderthals in the north had a fuzzy frontier.
Did they hate each other? Maybe. Did they keep separate cultures? Clearly not. They both liked the shells. Gowlett thinks the predilection might go back even further.
Chris Stringer from London adds that older sites in the Levant show similar mixing. Interbreeding likely happened 100k years ago there. Too small a sample here to be sure but… well. It’s plausible.
The stone stayed the same. The taste for shiny things stayed the same.
Who knows what else we agreed on that hasn’t rotted away?
We probably didn’t ask for permission when we moved in.
