Cave Discovery Suggests Neanderthals and Modern Humans May Have Shared Culture

Modern humans and Neanderthals may have shared more than land and genes. They may have also shared culture.

Modern humans and Neanderthals may have shared more than territory, tools, and genes. New evidence from a cave in southern Türkiye suggests the two groups may also have exchanged ideas and developed similar symbolic traditions over thousands of years.

The discovery comes from Üçağızlı II Cave, a site near one of the most important migration routes in human history. The Levant connected Africa with Eurasia, making it a natural passage for Homo sapiens leaving Africa and a likely meeting ground with Neanderthals already living farther north.

Despite the region’s importance, human remains from this period are extremely rare. An international team involving researchers from Türkiye, France, Japan, and Kyoto University spent five years excavating the cave with exceptional precision.

Their work revealed that Neanderthals and modern humans used the site across a period of more than 20,000 years. Both groups made similar stone tools and appear to have relied on comparable methods to survive in the same environment.

Ancient Shells Hint at Shared Symbolic Culture

The most revealing finds, however, were not tools or food remains.

Both groups deliberately collected the same type of marine shell, even though it offered virtually no nutritional value. Such objects may have been worn, displayed, exchanged, or valued for their appearance, although their exact purpose remains unknown.

That detail is important because symbolic behavior has often been treated as a defining feature of modern humans. Evidence that Neanderthals selected the same unusual shells raises the possibility that cultural preferences passed between the two populations, or that they participated in a shared regional tradition.

“Our findings indicate a deep level of cultural interaction,” says corresponding author Naoki Morimoto of KyotoU. “These two distinct but closely related human groups were not just adapting to the same environment: they were probably sharing symbolic preferences.”

What the Fossils Reveal About Early Migration

The cave also contained modern human fossils dating to approximately 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, placing them near a crucial stage in the spread of Homo sapiens beyond Africa.

These individuals may have been closely related to the founding population that eventually gave rise to today’s non-African populations. Another possibility is that they belonged to an earlier migration whose descendants remained in the Levant longer than scientists previously recognized.

Drone footage of the Üçağızlı II Cave in southern Türkiye. Credit: KyotoU / Naoki Morimoto

The findings add to a growing picture of Neanderthals and modern humans as populations whose lives repeatedly overlapped. Their encounters may have involved competition and interbreeding, but the shells suggest something more subtle: the movement of tastes, traditions, or meaning across species boundaries.

Üçağızlı II Cave therefore offers more than a record of two human groups occupying the same place. It provides a rare glimpse of a world in which different kinds of humans may have watched, learned from, and influenced one another.

Reference: “Long-term cultural continuity across the Neanderthal–modern human sequence at Üçağızlı II Cave, northern Levant” by İsmail Baykara, Didem Turan, Ece Eren Kural, Derya Silibolatlaz, Mustafa Kenan Agras, Eren Şahiner, Salih Kavak, Clément Zanolli, Yoshiro Ishihara, Wataru Morita and Naoki Morimoto, 6 July 2026, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2609061123

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