C1261 words1:56News Report American AccentPublished Jul 7, 2026 · Updated Jul 7, 2026

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A groundbreaking study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has revealed that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals may have sustained a shared culture for over twenty thousand years.

The research challenges longstanding assumptions in anthropology about the degree to which these two closely related species interacted during their period of coexistence.

The findings emerged from an extensive five-year excavation of Üçağızlı II Cave in southern Türkiye.

Within its layers, an international team of researchers unearthed human fossils, stone tools, animal remains, and decorative objects belonging to both species.

Had the two groups merely coexisted in the same environment, such overlapping material culture would be unlikely to appear so consistently throughout the archaeological record.

Co-author Naoki Morimoto, a paleoanthropologist at Kyoto University, emphasized that the evidence points to profound cultural exchange rather than mere environmental adaptation.

He argued that the two groups were likely sharing symbolic preferences, which suggests a level of cognitive and social interaction previously underestimated by researchers in the field of evolution.

The discovery of non-practical, presumably ornamental items at the site further substantiates this interpretation.

Most people alive today carry a small percentage of Neanderthal DNA, a biological legacy of interbreeding that occurred tens of thousands of years ago.

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However, the cultural dimension of this relationship had remained largely speculative until now.

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Between seventy thousand and fifty thousand years ago, Homo sapiens expanded beyond Africa in successive wave-like migrations, eventually encountering Neanderthals across the Middle East and Europe.

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It is within this broader context that the cave evidence assumes particular significance for understanding human evolution.

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Modern Humans May Have Shared Culture With Neanderthals for 20,000 Years

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