Israeli archaeologists find oldest human remains out of Africa, from nearly 200,000 years ago
Israeli archaeologists have found the remains of a nearly 200,000-year-old human jawbone in a cave on Mount Carmel, a discovery they predict will change what we know about the evolution and spread of our species.
From article, (Israeli archaeologists have found the remains of a nearly 200,000-year-old human jawbone in a cave on Mount Carmel, a discovery they predict will change what we know about the evolution and spread of our species.
The jawbone, dated to between 177,000 and 194,000 years ago, suggests Homo sapiens was already leaving Africa through the Middle East and populating the rest of the globe at a time when, according to previous research, modern humans were thought to be barely taking their first evolutionary steps in their ancestral home in East Africa.
Details about the find will be published in the journal Science on Friday.
“The moment you say there is modern Homo sapiens in Israel between 170,000 to 200,000 years ago, suddenly all the pieces of the puzzle fall into place,” says Prof. Israel Hershkovitz, a physical anthropologist at Tel Aviv University and lead researcher on the Science paper.
The find at Misliya Cave makes sense in light of several discoveries that have been made over the last couple of years and that have already suggested that the traditional “out of Africa” paradigm needed to be reviewed, Hershkovitz says.
Those discoveries include last year’s announcement that remains found at Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, had been identified as early Homo sapiens and dated to 300,000 years ago – some 100,000 years before our supposedly earliest ancestors from Ethiopia.
Researchers had also previously uncovered 47 human teeth in a cave in Daoxian, China, that were around 100,000 years old, meaning that Homo sapiens reached the Far East tens of thousands of years before that supposedly unique exodus from Africa.)
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