The Atlantic has a story about a recent discovery that threatens to rewrite the early history of modern humans. The find from an Israeli cave dates to between 177,000 and 194,000 years ago. These dates, along with a 315,000 year old fossil from Ethiopia, call into question the previous "Out of Africa" estimates of 50-60,000 years.
After more than a decade of work, the team has now confirmed that the Misliya jaw belonged to a modern human, and that it is even more ancient than the Skhul remains. At somewhere between 177,000 and 194,000 years old, it now holds the record for the earliest modern-human fossil outside Africa. It tells us that our species must have ventured beyond our birth continent far earlier than other fossils had suggested.
That’s not unexpected, though. Many lines of evidence show that early humans probably dispersed from Africa on several occasions, encountering other hominids like Neanderthals and Denisovans who had already established themselves in the wider world. These groups all had sex, leaving traces of their DNA in each other’s genomes. And based on these exchanges, geneticists have estimated that some humans must have been living beyond Africa by 220,000 years ago or more. If that’s the case, there must have been fossils outside the continent that were older than the Skhul specimens. It was just a matter of finding them.
“The Misliya fossil is significant because it is the first finding that conclusively shows that early modern-human population expansions out of Africa actually did occur even before the Skhul episode,” says Katerina Harvati, from the University of Tübingen.
