Modern Humans Or Neandertals? New Evidence Sheds Light On Cave Fossils' Age

A team of researchers from the Natural History Museum in Vienna, from the University of Vienna in Austria and from the Washington University, USA recently conducted the first successful direct dating of the material. Several previous attempts to radiocarbon date the Mladeč specimens directly have failed, but in the present attempt by using teeth as dating material reliable results were obtained. The findings are now documented in a recent issue of Nature.

The dating results document that these samples are as old as we thought they should be, agree Maria Teschler-Nicola from the Natural History Museum in Vienna and Erik Trinkaus from the Washington University in St. Louis, the two anthropologists involved in this study. The Mladeč samples date to around 31,000 years ago, reports Eva Maria Wild from the VERA (Vienna Environmental Research Accelerator) Laboratory at University of Vienna, where the radiocarbon dating has been performed. This is the oldest assemblage of modern humans in Europe which retains many portions of the skeleton plus archaeological objects from the Aurignacian period. Only the two human specimen from a site in Romania are dated to ~35,000 years and are accordingly older. At Mladeč there are multiple individuals - at least 5 or 6 represented. The dating shows that the Mladeč assemblage is central to discussions of modern human emergence in Europe and the fate of the Neandertals as well as discussions of the association of early modern humans with the Aurignacian culture.

The Mladeč remains are universally accepted as those of early modern humans. However, there has been an ongoing debate as to whether they exhibit also distinctive archaic features, indicative of some degree of Neandertal ancestry, or are morphologically aligned solely with recent humans and therefore document only a dispersal of modern humans into Europe.

The radiocarbon dating of the Mladeč assemblage confirms that they derived from the time period of the middle to late Aurignacian of Central Europe. Given the presence of multiple individuals, males and females, adult and immature with cranial, dental and postcranial elements, the Mladeč assemblage becomes the oldest directly dated substantial assemblage of modern human remains in Europe.

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Reference:

Direct dating of Early Upper Palaeolithic human remains from Mladeč

Eva M. Wild, Maria Teschler-Nicola, Walter Kutschera, Peter Steier, Erik Trinkaus & Wolfgang Wanek Nature, 19. Mai 2005