Customers who pre-ordered an Apple Vision Pro for delivery this Friday, February 2 should know one thing: the box it comes in is pretty huge. The headset is compact, but the packaging is big.

The Vision Pro box isn’t filled with air, though. Including the headset, the kit comes with several essential parts, including the weighty aluminum battery pack, a USB-C cable and 30W power adapter to charge it up, two straps (the pre-installed Solo Knit Band and a second Double Loop Band with top strap), two light seal cushions, a cover for the front glass, and — *drum roll* — a polishing cloth.

For thousands of years, Ilsenhöhle (or Ilse’s Cave in English) in Germany was somewhat of a paleolithic hidey-hole for animals like hibernating bears and cave hyenas, who were present in Europe for about a million years. The cave, which is nestled directly below a castle built from the same rock formation, was also an occasional safe haven for our modern human ancestors migrating in waves to Europe at least 46,000 years ago.

But Ilsenhöhle isn’t just a prehistoric sanctuary; for scientists today, its stratified layers are a time capsule now revealing an unprecedented overlap in the timelines of anatomically modern humans and another hominid ancestor: Neanderthals.

In a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature, an archaeological analysis of skeletal remains excavated from the cave between 2016 and 2022 places our modern human ancestors north of the Alps at the earliest 45,000 years ago. That means that before the Neanderthals went extinct around 40,000 years ago, ancient and modern humans in that region co-existed for some thousands of years.