Their eyes met across the rugged mountain landscape of prehistoric Romania.
He was a Neanderthal, and stark naked apart from a fur cape. He had good posture and pale skin, perhaps reddened slightly with sunburn. Around one of his thick, muscular biceps he wore bracelet of eagle-talons. She was an early modern human, clad in an animal-skin coat with a wolf-fur trim. She had dark skin, long legs, and her hair was worn in braids.
He cleared his throat, looked her up and down, and – in an absurdly high-pitched, nasal voice – deployed his best chat-up line. She stared back blankly. Luckily for him, they didn’t speak the same language. They had an awkward laugh and, well, we can all guess what happened next.
Of course, it could have been far less like a scene from a steamy romance novel. Perhaps the woman was actually the Neanderthal and the man belonged to our own species. Maybe their relationship was of the casual, pragmatic kind, because there just weren’t many people around at the time. It’s even been suggested, too, that such hook-ups weren’t consensual.
While we will never know what really happened in this encounter – or others like it – what we can be sure of is that such a couple did get together. Around 37,000-42,000 years later, in February 2002, two explorers made an extraordinary discovery in an underground cave system in the southwestern Carpathian mountains, near the Romanian town of Anina.
Even getting there was no easy task. First they waded neck-deep in an underground river for 200m (656ft). Then came a scuba dive for 30m (98ft) along an underwater passage, followed by a 300-metre (984ft) ascent up to the poarta, or “mouse hole” – an opening through which they entered a previously unknown chamber.
Inside the Peştera cu Oase, or "Cave with Bones", they found thousands of mammalian bones. Over its long history, it’s thought to have primarily been inhabited by male cave bears – extinct relatives of the brown bear – to which they largely belong. Resting on the surface among them was a human jawbone, which radiocarbon dating revealed to be from one of the oldest known early modern humans in Europe.
The Link LonkJanuary 13, 2021 at 05:27PM
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What we know about sex with Neanderthals - BBC News
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