The discovery of a child’s tooth and stone tools in a cave in southern France suggests that Homo sapiens was in Western Europe around 54,000 years ago. This is several thousand years earlier than previously thought, indicating that the two species could have coexisted for long periods. The research was published in the journal Science Advances. The artifacts were discovered in a cave known as Grotte Mandrin in the Rhone Valley by a team led by Professor Ludovic Slimak of the University of Toulouse: “We are now able to demonstrate that Homo sapiens arrived 12,000 years earlier than expected, and this population was then replaced by other Neanderthal populations. And this literally rewrites all our history books.”
