K. HARVATI ET AL/NATURE 2019
SciNews has a story about a skull discovered on Greece's southern coast in 1978. That skull dates to at least 210,000 years ago. It was encased in a rock that included a Neandertal skull dating to at least 170,000 years ago. If these findings are verified, this skill represents the oldest Homo sapiens fossil outside of Africa and increases that age by 160,000 years! That original paper appeared in the journal Nature.
“Multiple Homo sapiens populations dispersed out of Africa starting much earlier, and reaching much farther into Europe, than previously thought,” Harvati said at a July 8 news conference. African H. sapiensoriginated roughly 300,000 years ago (SN: 7/8/17, p. 6).
A small group of humans may have reached what’s now Greece more than 200,000 years ago, she suggested. Neandertals who settled in southeastern Europe not long after that may have replaced those first H. sapiens. Then humans arriving in Mediterranean Europe tens of thousands of years later would eventually have replaced resident Neandertals, who died out around 40,000 years ago (SN Online: 6/26/19).
But Harvati’s group can’t exclude the possibility that H. sapiens and Neandertals simultaneously inhabited southeastern Europe more than 200,000 years ago and sometimes interbred. A 2017 analysis of ancient and modern DNA concluded that humans likely mated with European Neandertals at that time.
The two skulls were held in a small section of wall that had washed into Greece’s Apidima Cave from higher cliff sediment and then solidified roughly 150,000 years ago. Since one skull is older than the other, each must originally have been deposited in different sediment layers before ending up about 30 centimeters apart on the cave wall, the researchers say.
