A cave in Turkey shows Neanderthals and modern humans using the very same tools.

For most of the twentieth century, the arrival of modern humans in a region was treated as something close to a replacement event for the Neanderthals who lived there before them, two populations with distinct toolkits, diets and ways of surviving the Ice Age. A limestone cave on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast is now pushing back against that tidy narrative, with five years of excavation turning up evidence that both groups occupied the same shelter, hunted the same animals and shaped stone in nearly identical ways.

The site, Üçağızlı II Cave near Turkey’s southern coast, has produced layered deposits spanning tens of thousands of years, letting researchers compare Neanderthal and early Homo sapiens occupations from the same physical location rather than piecing together comparisons across scattered sites hundreds of miles apart.

A Shared Toolkit Across Two Species

Researchers examining stone tools recovered from the cave’s various layers found that both Neanderthals and the modern humans who later occupied the same space relied on strikingly similar Middle Paleolithic, or Mousterian, technology, according to Phys.org. Both groups favored a specific method known as parallel flake production, a way of striking a stone core to consistently produce usable blades and points. That level of technical overlap is unusual in the archaeological record, where toolkits are often used as one of the clearest markers separating Neanderthal sites from modern human ones.

The two groups also appear to have pursued nearly identical prey. Excavators recovered bones from wild goats, fallow deer, roe deer and wild boar in layers associated with both populations, suggesting each group was reading the surrounding landscape and hunting it in much the same way, rather than each species carving out a distinct ecological niche.

An Unexpected Shell-Collecting Habit

The overlap extends beyond survival tools and into behavior that archaeologists usually treat as more symbolic than practical. Both Neanderthals and modern humans at the cave collected a specific type of marine seashell that had essentially no value as food, a habit previously associated almost exclusively with Homo sapiens and often cited as evidence of symbolic thinking or personal ornamentation unique to modern humans. Finding the same shell-collecting pattern in Neanderthal layers complicates that assumption, raising the possibility that the behavior was either shared through contact between the two populations or independently arrived at by both.

What the Teeth Reveal

Dental remains recovered from the cave’s stratigraphy allowed researchers to anchor which layers belonged to which species with more confidence than tool style alone would allow. The oldest excavated layers, dated to between roughly 77,000 and 59,000 years ago, contained teeth identified as Neanderthal. The uppermost layer, spanning about 59,000 to 47,000 years ago, held teeth attributed to early Homo sapiens. That sequence places both populations at the same cave across a long stretch of time, though not necessarily occupying it simultaneously, since the layers represent separate periods of use rather than a single mixed occupation.

The dating window matters because it falls within a period when Neanderthals and modern humans are known to have coexisted, and in some cases interbred, across parts of Eurasia. Üçağızlı II adds a specific, well-documented location to that broader picture, one where the material culture left behind by each group is close to indistinguishable from the other.

Rethinking Cultural Boundaries

The findings feed into a longer-running debate among paleoanthropologists over how much credit Neanderthals deserve for complex, humanlike behavior. For decades, symbolic acts such as ornament collection were treated as evidence that a population had crossed some cognitive threshold associated with modern humans specifically. Sites like Üçağızlı II make that threshold harder to draw cleanly, since the same behaviors and tool traditions appear on both sides of the species line at the same location.

Researchers involved in the excavation have been cautious about overstating what the overlap proves. Shared toolkits and shared prey could reflect direct cultural transmission between the two populations, learning passed between neighboring or overlapping groups, or simply two closely related hominins independently arriving at similar solutions to the same environmental challenges. Either explanation would still represent a meaningful shift in how the relationship between Neanderthals and early modern humans in this part of the eastern Mediterranean gets understood, moving away from a story of separation and replacement and toward one of much closer, longer-lasting overlap than the fossil record has generally suggested.

Why Coastal Turkey Keeps Producing Landmark Finds

The eastern Mediterranean coastline sits at a geographic crossroads that made it a likely corridor for early human movement between Africa, the Levant and the rest of Eurasia, which is part of why caves along Turkey’s southern shore have produced an outsized share of significant Paleolithic discoveries relative to their size. Üçağızlı II is not an isolated dig; it sits near other cave systems in the same coastal strip that have separately yielded evidence of early modern human presence in the region, giving researchers a cluster of related sites to cross-reference rather than relying on a single excavation to support broad conclusions about the area’s deep history.

Five years is also a meaningful commitment for a single excavation, and the duration reflects how carefully archaeologists have had to work through the cave’s layered deposits. Stratigraphic layers this old are typically thin, compressed and easily disturbed, meaning that recovering reliable dental and tool evidence tied to specific time periods requires slow, methodical excavation rather than rapid digging, with each layer documented and sampled before the next is removed.

What Comes Next for the Site

Excavation teams working Üçağızlı II have indicated the cave likely holds additional undisturbed layers below what has already been examined, meaning the current findings may represent only part of the story the site has to tell. Ongoing analysis of the recovered stone tools, animal bones and shell ornaments is expected to continue for years, since dating and residue analysis on material this old require specialized laboratory work that takes considerably longer than the initial excavation itself. Researchers have also flagged the shell-collecting evidence in particular for further study, hoping that comparing the specific shell species and their wear patterns across Neanderthal and modern human layers might reveal whether the two populations were using the shells in the same way or adapting a shared raw material to different purposes.

Morning Overview produced this article with AI assistance and reviewed it against the cited sources.

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