Hhe Grotto Mandrin lies above the east bank of the Rhône in southern France. It’s more of a rock overhang than a proper deep Stone Age cave, yet this site continued to serve as a shelter for Neanderthals for tens of thousands of years before the most recent Ice Age peaked around 22,000 years ago. However, according to some researchers, not only them. In February 2022, a 23-strong team led by Ludovic Slimak from the Université de Toulouse published finds from a layer in the cave sediment called “layer E” and came to the conclusion that representatives of our own human race must have stayed here 56,800 to 51,700 years ago, of A wise manor “anatomically modern man”, as he is also called by the scientists working on this epoch.
The tooth of a child belonging to this modern human species proves this, as does a total of 2267 stone tools or fragments or flakes from such, including hundreds of deliberately pointed pieces of two different formats: tips from 30 to 60 millimeters in length and significantly smaller ones down to ten millimeters. The style of these artifacts is so different from Neanderthal stoneware that Slimak sees them as evidence of a separate tool culture he has dubbed “Néronien” and which he associates with members of our tribal lineage.
What if not an arrow? 54,000 year old stone spire
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Image: Laure Metz/CNRS
Now Slimak’s then-co-author Laure Metz of Aix-Marseille Université, along with Slimak himself and an American colleague, published an analysis of 852 of these Néronien stone artifacts in Science Advances, concluding that the larger peaks could well have belonged to lances or javelins, a weapon technology that had long been known at the time. The smaller tips, on the other hand, must have been intended for arrows shot with a bow. Because only a bow could generate a force with which the smallest of these tips could kill an animal, Laure Metz told Nature magazine. And Ludovic Slimak adds: “It is not possible to use these tiny points in any other way than with a bow and arrow.” He finds agreement with John Shea from Stony Brook University in the American state of New York, who worked on the publications of the Slimak group was not involved: “The fact that these things are arrows is more convincing than the arguments that have already been made from data from the past 12,000 years.”
Are the artifacts actually arrowheads?
According to the authors around Slimak, layer E testifies to a first, not yet lasting advance of the A wise man north along the Rhone Valley to Central Europe inhabited by Neanderthals. Apparently they were already in possession of a superior weapon that could kill animals from a great distance – and with as many attempts as there are arrows in the quiver. Hunting and thus the procurement of food in Ice Age Europe is much more effective with such equipment. There is no evidence that Neanderthals possessed this technology, nor do they appear to have copied it from anatomically modern humans. The Neanderthal layers above layer E, which Slimak and colleagues found in the Mandrin cave, also lack those arrowheads.
However, the oldest reliable evidence of bows and arrows only comes from the Magdalenian culture, thousands of years after the Ice Age maximum. Finds from Sibudu Cave, north of Durban, South Africa, slightly older than those in Grotto Mandrin, and slightly younger from Sri Lanka are equivocal. But in the eyes of other scientists, this applies at least as much to the findings that have now been published. Because not all experts are as convinced of these as John Shea. The Belgian archaeologist Veerle Rots from the Université Liége, who is currently digging in Sibudu, clearly criticizes the authors of the current work. “They have no reliable evidence that they are projectiles,” she says. “Not to mention a specific way they should have been powered.”
In addition, by no means all researchers are as certain as the team around Slimak and Metz that layer E of the Mandrin cave really is early traces of Homo sapiens in Central Europe. “In my opinion, the stratigraphy of Mandrin is very problematic” , says archaeologist and prehistorian Nicholas Conard from the University of Tübingen, who is also currently digging in the Sibudu Cave in South Africa. The arguments for the presence of modern humans in Central Europe as early as 54,000 years ago – and thus ten thousand years earlier than the earliest generally accepted traces of the A wise man in the heart of the continent – Conard doesn’t think that’s convincing. And indeed, the idea that the disappearance of the Neanderthals could have something to do with inferior armament technology sounds more like modern times than Stone Age.