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ARCHAEOLOGY

Puzzling out the Middle-to-Upper Palaeolithic transition

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 4, pages 775–776 (2020)Cite this article

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Homo sapiens remains, molecular data and a revised chronology for the Bulgarian site of Bacho Kiro document the earliest known presence of our species in Europe, representing an important jigsaw piece in the Middle-to-Upper Palaeolithic transition.

Sometime between 50,000 and 39,000 years ago, Homo sapiens replaced autochthonous Neanderthal populations, prompting two major questions for archaeologists today: when did H. sapiens enter the European landscape and what processes were implicated in the disappearance of Neanderthals? Both are challenging to address via an ancient and fragmentary archaeological record, but timing our species’ entry into Europe would seem straightforward since it can be answered by dating human remains. This has proven to be more complicated than it seems, which is why an early site with dateable materials and good genetic preservation is such an important commodity. The Bulgarian site of Bacho Kiro offers just this and is the subject of two studies published this week in Nature and Nature Ecology & Evolution: in Nature, a paper by Hublin et al.1 examines H. sapiens genetic material from the site, and in Nature Ecology & Evolution, a paper by Fewlass et al.2 establishes this material as the earliest direct evidence of our species in Europe.

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Fig. 1: Hypothetical stratified archaeological sequence covering the late Middle and Initial Upper Palaeolithic (IUP) periods.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. UMR 5199 PACEA, CNRS, Université de Bordeaux, Pessac, France

    William E. Banks

  2. Biodiversity Institute, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA

    William E. Banks

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  1. William E. Banks
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Correspondence to William E. Banks.

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Banks, W.E. Puzzling out the Middle-to-Upper Palaeolithic transition. Nat Ecol Evol 4, 775–776 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-020-1162-1

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