Scientists call it the earliest sign of our species outside Africa: a partial skull recovered from a cave in Greece. Analysis of two fossils from a Greek cave has shed light on early hominins in Eurasia. One fossil is the earliest known specimen of Homo sapiens found outside Africa; the other is a Neanderthal who lived 40,000 years later.
Its estimated age is at least 210,000 years old, making it 16,000 or more years older than an upper jaw bone from Israel that was reported last year. It shows our species began leaving Africa much earlier than previously thought, researchers reported Wednesday.
The travelers to Greece evidently left no descendants alive today. Other research has established that the exodus from Africa that led to our worldwide spread didn’t happen until more than 100,000 years later. The new work is the latest sign of earlier, dead-end exits from the continent where Homo sapiens evolved.
The fossil, from the rear of a skull, was actually found decades ago — excavated in the late 1970s from the Apidima Cave in the southern Peloponnese region of Greece and later kept in a University of Athens museum.
“Not a lot of attention was paid to it,” said Katerina Harvati of the University of Tuebingen in Germany, who was invited to study the fossil.
Harvati and others report the results of their analysis in the journal Nature. To establish the age, they analyzed bits of bone from the fossil. To identify what species it came from, the researchers compared a virtual reconstruction to the shapes of fossils from known species.
Harvati said finding evidence that our species had reached Greece by that time was initially a surprise, though in hindsight “it’s not that difficult to imagine that it would have happened.”
The origin and early dispersal of Homo sapiens has long been a subject of both popular and scholarly interest. It is almost universally agreed that Homo sapiens (modern humans) evolved in Africa, with the earliest known fossil representatives of our species dated to around 315,000 years ago in Morocco and approximately 260,000 years ago in South Africa .
. Writing in Nature, Harvati describe their analysis of a fossil from Apidima Cave in southern Greece that they report to be an early modern H. sapiens at least 210,000 years old. This fossil is the oldest known modern human in Europe, and probably in all of Eurasia, and is more than 160,000 years older than the next oldest known European fossil of H. sapiens.
The Apidima Cave complex was excavated in the late 1970s. Two partial crania (skulls without the lower jaw), named Apidima 1 and Apidima 2, were recovered in a single block of a type of rock called breccia. Neither fossil was previously described in detail. Apidima 2 includes the facial region of the skull and had been identified as a Neanderthal7. Apidima 1 consists of only the back of the skull and had not been previously allocated definitively to a species. Harvati and colleagues used computed tomography to scan the fossils, and generated a 3D virtual reconstruction of each specimen. They analysed each fossil to assess aspects of its shape, and thus to determine the fossils’ similarity to those of other species.
full story: nature.com, associatedpress
This DEBUNKS the “out of Africa” theory. Period.
Clearly, your arithmetic skills are lacking. Look at the map, as well as the text. Morocco: 315,000 years old: Greece: 210 K. There is a difference of 105,000 years!
Given that the Stone Age (i.e. the earliest human existence) is thought to have started 4 million years ago, the date of 210,000 years is not significant in the oldest evolution of humankind. The current theories are clear that Africa is the origin of all human life.