In a cave in southern Turkey, two different human species left strikingly similar traces across more than 20,000 years. Excavations at Üçağızlı II Cave, in the northern Levant, suggest that Neanderthals and modern humans there did not merely follow one another in time but sustained a shared cultural tradition – a finding that makes the boundary between the two species look surprisingly porous.
An international team of researchers from Turkey, France and Japan, including scientists from Kyoto University, uncovered the site over five years of millimeter-by-millimeter excavation. The results appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Same tools, same tastes
Both species used identical stone-tool techniques and survival strategies at the site. More remarkable still, their shared habits reached beyond everyday practicality. Both Neanderthals and modern humans deliberately collected a particular marine seashell that was virtually worthless as food. That preference for a non-utilitarian, probably symbolic object had until now been regarded as unique to Homo sapiens.
"Our findings indicate a deep level of cultural interaction," says Naoki Morimoto of Kyoto University, one of the corresponding authors. The two closely related groups, he says, were not merely adapting to the same environment but likely sharing symbolic preferences.
The site sits at a historically pivotal spot. On their way out of Africa, early modern humans passed through the Levant, the corridor linking Africa and Eurasia. Yet human fossils from this era are scarce there. The Homo sapiens remains recovered from the cave date to roughly 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, placing them squarely within the decisive phase of human dispersal. These individuals may be close relatives of the founding lineage from which all non-African people alive today descend.
Many people still carry a small share of Neanderthal DNA. The discovery fills a longstanding gap in the archaeological record and offers evidence that encounters between the two species were not limited to occasional contact but, over millennia, produced shared knowledge and shared symbols.