ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Reevaluating the timing of Neanderthal disappearance in Northwest Europe.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers.
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25 citing papers in PubMed.
- Bony labyrinth morphology reveals deep population history and isolation among Homo sapiens in prehistoric northeastern Africa (44-3 ka).Nature communications · 2026Article
- Article
- Highly selective cannibalism in the Late Pleistocene of Northern Europe reveals Neandertals were targeted prey.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Direct hydroxyproline radiocarbon dating of the Lapedo child (Abrigo do Lagar Velho, Leiria, Portugal).Science advances · 2025Article
- Semicircular canals shed light on bottleneck events in the evolution of the Neanderthal clade.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Assembling Ancestors: the manipulation of Neolithic and Gallo-Roman skeletal remains from Pommerœul, Belgium.Antiquity · 2024Article
- Long genetic and social isolation in Neanderthals before their extinction.Cell genomics · 2024Article
- Environmental conditions associated with initial northern expansion of anatomically modern humans.Nature communications · 2024Article
- The Neanderthal niche space of Western Eurasia 145 ka to 30 ka ago.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Article
- Chronological and genetic analysis of an Upper Palaeolithic female infant burial from Borsuka Cave, Poland.iScience · 2023Article
- Identification and tentative removal of collagen glue in Palaeolithic worked bone objects: implications for ZooMS and radiocarbon dating.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Major Genetic Risk Factors for Dupuytren's Disease Are Inherited From Neandertals.Molecular biology and evolution · 2023Article
- Human cooperation and evolutionary transitions in individuality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Article
- Lincombian-Ranisian-Jerzmanowician Industry and South Moravian Sites: aJournal of paleolithic archaeology · 2023Article
- The earliest unambiguous Neanderthal engravings on cave walls: La Roche-Cotard, Loire Valley, France.PloS one · 2023Article
- Back to the future: The advantage of studying key events in human evolution using a new high resolution radiocarbon method.PloS one · 2023Review
- Optimal linear estimation models predict 1400-2900 years of overlap between Homo sapiens and Neandertals prior to their disappearance from France and northern Spain.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Merging morphological and genetic evidence to assess hybridization in Western Eurasian late Pleistocene hominins.Nature ecology & evolution · 2022Article
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13 authors.
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Abstract
Elucidating when Neanderthal populations disappeared from Eurasia is a key question in paleoanthropology, and Belgium is one of the key regions for studying the Middle to Upper Paleolithic transition. Previous radiocarbon dating placed the Spy Neanderthals among the latest surviving Neanderthals in Northwest Europe with reported dates as young as 23,880 ± 240 B.P. (OxA-8912). Questions were raised, however, regarding the reliability of these dates. Soil contamination and carbon-based conservation products are known to cause problems during the radiocarbon dating of bulk collagen samples. Employing a compound-specific approach that is today the most efficient in removing contamination and ancient genomic analysis, we demonstrate here that previous dates produced on Neanderthal specimens from Spy were inaccurately young by up to 10,000 y due to the presence of unremoved contamination. Our compound-specific radiocarbon dates on the Neanderthals from Spy and those from Engis and Fonds-de-Forêt demonstrate that they disappeared from Northwest Europe at 44,200 to 40,600 cal B.P. (at 95.4% probability), much earlier than previously suggested. Our data contribute significantly to refining models for Neanderthal disappearance in Europe and, more broadly, show that chronometric models regarding the appearance or disappearance of animal or hominin groups should be based only on radiocarbon dates obtained using robust pretreatment methods.
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