A 55,000 - yr - old skull excavate in an Israeli cave is the firstHomo sapiensfossil discovered outside of Africa briefly after our species begin exploring different continents . And it may have belong to the forebear of the very first modern Europeans . Thefindings , published inNaturethis week , also suggest that world live on in the same locality with Neanderthals for grand of years — and that they may have interbred .
consort to the fogy record , anatomically innovative humans were still populate in Africa when other members of our genusHomo , from Neanderthals to the “ hobbit , ” were residing in Europe and Asia . Our coinage did n’t expand across Eurasia until about 40,000 to 60,000 years ago , finally replacing all other forms . Last year , researchers used DNA extracted from a fogey thigh bone tosequence the genome of a 45,000 - year - old mod human malefrom Siberia ; those results suggest that his ascendant conflate with Neanderthals around 50,000 to 60,000 years ago .
However , until now , there have been noHomo sapiensfossils from the Middle East corridor during the polar time after modern human beings left Africa but before expanding into Europe and Asia . Who is the ancestor of all present - day , non - African populations ? Now , a large international team led byIsrael Hershkovitz of Tel Aviv Universityhave examined a partial skullcap excavated from Manot Cave ( pictured above and below ) in Western Galilee , Israel .
The Manot braincase , Hershkovitz tells the New York Times , “ is the miss connection between African and European populations . ” Various survey are depict to the right .
Based on uranium - thorium techniques , the skull dates back 54,700 years . And based on its features — including the acme of its wide part and a distinctive bun - work occipital region ( render , b)—the fogey is unequivocally modernistic , the source compose . Shape - wise , it resemble modern African and European skulls from the Late Stone Age , but it ’s different from other homo from the Levant part , which includes Israel , Jordan , and Lebanon . That means the Manot masses were closely relate to the first modern humans that by and by colonized Europe .
Additionally , this is the first fossil grounds designate that modern humans and Neanderthals populate the area around the same time during the tardy Pleistocene . “ The southerly Levant is the only piazza where anatomically modern man and Neanderthals were subsist side by side for thousands and thousands of years,”Hershkovitz tells Nature News . That makes the Middle East “ the most likely place for the love life intimacy ” between the two , he says to Science . However , we ca n’t experience for sure without DNA from the skull — but that ’s unbelievable for now , pay the red-hot , balmy clime where it was find .
image : Israel Hershkovitz , Ofer Marder & Omry Barzilai ( top , bottom ) , I. Hershkovitz et al . , Nature 2015 ( in-between )
