Hi Gerry... Check out the part about Neanderthals being in northern europe
200,000 years or more?

Mod­ern hu­mans who first arose in Af­ri­ca moved in­to Eu­rope as ear­ly as
about 45,000 years ago, a new study in­di­cates.

The ev­i­dence con­sists of stone, bone and ivo­ry tools found un­der a
lay­er of an­cient vol­can­ic ash some 250 miles south of Mos­cow, said John
Hof­fecker of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Col­o­rad­o at Boul­der.

An as­sem­blage of bone and ivo­ry ar­ti­facts from the low­est lay­er
at Kos­ten­ki that in­cludes a per­fo­rat­ed shell, a prob­a­ble small
hu­man fig­ur­ine (three views, top cen­ter) and sev­er­al as­sort­ed awls,
mat­tocks and bone points dat­ing to about 45,000 years ago. (Cour­te­sy
CU-Boul­der)

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"The big sur­prise here is the very ear­ly pres­ence of mod­ern hu­mans in
one of the cold­est, dri­est places in Eu­rope," Hof­fecker added. It's "one
of the last places we would have ex­pected peo­ple from Af­ri­ca to oc­cu­py
first."

The site yielded the ear­li­est ev­i­dence of mod­ern hu­mans in Eu­rope:
per­fo­rat­ed shell or­na­ments and a carved piece of mam­moth ivo­ry, he
said.

The lat­ter, found five years ago, seems to be the head of a small hu­man
fig­urine-bro­ken and per­haps nev­er fin­ished by its mak­er more than
40,000 years ago, said Hof­fecker. "If con­firmed, it will be the old­est
ex­am­ple of fig­ur­a­tive art ev­er dis­cov­ered."

Hof­fecker and col­leagues at the Rus­sian Acad­e­my of Sci­ences de­tail
the find­ings in the Jan. 12 is­sue of the re­search jour­nal Sci­ence.

The re­search­ers led a dig at Kos­ten­ki, a group of more than 20 sites
along the Don Riv­er in Rus­sia that have been stud­ied for dec­ades.
Kostenki pre­vi­ously yielded ana­tom­i­cally mod­ern hu­man bones and
ar­ti­facts be­tween 30,000 and 40,000 years old, they said. These
in­clud­ed the old­est firm­ly dat­ed bone and ivo­ry nee­dles with
eye­lets, in­di­cat­ing the in­hab­i­tants were tai­lor­ing furs to sur­vive
the cold.

"The ar­ti­facts are un­mis­tak­a­bly the work of mod­ern hu­mans,"
Hof­fecker said, adding that his team dat­ed the over­ly­ing sed­i­ment by
sev­eral meth­ods.

Ana­tom­i­cally mod­ern hu­mans are thought to have aris­en in sub-Saharan
Af­ri­ca around 200,000 years ago.

Kostenki al­so con­tains ev­i­dence that mod­ern hu­mans were rap­id­ly
broad­en­ing their di­et to in­clude small mam­mals and fresh­wa­ter foods,
an in­di­ca­tion they were "re­mak­ing them­selves tech­no­log­i­cally,"
Hof­fecker said. They may have used traps and snares to catch hares and
arc­tic fox­es, ex­ploit­ing large ar­eas fair­ly eas­i­ly, he added: "they
prob­a­bly set out their nets and traps and went home for lunch."

Mod­ern hu­mans may have first en­tered this part of Eu­rope be­cause
com­peti­tors such as Ne­an­der­thals were ab­sent he­re, Hof­fecker
sug­gested. "The Ne­an­der­thals, who had oc­cu­pied Eu­rope for more than
200,000 years, seem to have left the back door open for mod­ern hu­mans."

Ex­cept for some ear­ly sites in the Near East, the old­est ev­i­dence of
mod­ern hu­mans out­side Af­ri­ca comes from Aus­tral­ia rough­ly 50,000
years ago, said Hof­fecker.

In the same is­sue of Sci­ence, re­search­ers led by Fred­er­ick E. Grine of
the State Uni­ver­si­ty of New York at Stony Brook pre­sented what they
called the first fos­sil ev­i­dence that mod­ern hu­mans left sub-Saharan
Af­ri­ca for Eur­a­sia be­tween 65,000 and 25,000 years ago. Some
sci­en­tists had ar­gued that this oc­curred a few tens of thou­sands of
years ear­li­er.

The ev­i­dence con­sisted of a South Af­ri­can skull, dat­ed as about 36,000
years old and close­ly re­sem­bling those of hu­mans then liv­ing in Eu­rope
and far east­ern Asia. These pop­u­la­tions thus "shared a very re­cent
com­mon an­ces­tor," wrote Ted Goebel of Tex­as A&M Uni­ver­si­ty in a
com­men­tary in the jour­nal. He wrote that mod­ern hu­mans like­ly first
mi­grat­ed out along the South Asian coast and in­to Aus­tral­ia, and on­ly
lat­er in­to harsher north­ern zones such as Kos­tenki.

chao/Silk