Nature has a story of the recent discovery of a cranium which shows that modern humans Homo sapiens were living in the Middle East 55,000 years ago. The skull bone was found when a cave, which had been sealed for the last 15,000 years, was opened by a bulldozer clearing land for development near the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel. Amateur speleologists were the first to search the cave, and they spotted the battered bone on a rock ledge. The Israel Antiquities Authority launched a complete survey and found other artifacts including stone tools. Parts of the cave are still being excavated.
A 55,000-year-old incomplete skull found in Israel may belong to a human group that interbred with Neanderthals. Discovered deep in a cave by amateur speleologists, the partial cranium also fills a major gap in the fossil record of Homo sapiens’ journey from Africa to Europe.
“Here we actually hold a skull of a human being that was living next to the Neanderthals,” says Israel Hershkovitz, the leader of a study published today in Nature (I. Hershkovitz et al. Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature14134; 2015). “Potentially he is the one that could interbreed with the Neanderthals,” says Hershkovitz, who is a physical anthropologist at Tel Aviv University in Israel.
Genome studies of Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) and of both ancient and contemporary H. sapiens suggest that the two species interbred somewhere in the Middle East between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago (Q. Fu et al. Nature 514, 445–449; 2014). But the problem with this idea is that no remains of anatomically modern humans have been discovered in the Middle East from this crucial period, after H. sapiens left Africa and before it colonized Europe and Asia.
