(Inside Science) — The earliest modern human fossils and artifacts ever unearthed from Europe reveal ancient humans may have inspired or taught Neanderthals to make jewelry, a new study finds.
Much remains unknown about when modern humans entered Europe. Previous research suggested the earliest modern human artifacts on the continent, which included bone flutes and ivory figurines, belonged to the so-called Aurignacian tradition, and "the oldest dates we had of the Aurignacian in western Europe went back to about 42,000 to 43,000 years ago," said Jean-Jacques Hublin, a paleoanthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
