THE history of our species needs rewriting – again. A jawbone from a cave in Israel is at least 177,000 years old, indicating that Homo sapiens left its African birthplace at least 50,000 years earlier than thought. A second study implies our forebears roamed widely.
Our species evolved in Africa in the last few hundred thousand years. About 70,000 years ago, people spread to every continent.
But there were earlier forays out of Africa. The oldest firm evidence is from Skhul and Qafzeh in Israel, 120,000 years ago. It is thought the people who dwelled there have no living descendants.
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Now Israel Hershkovitz of Tel Aviv University in Israel and his colleagues have pushed back the date of our first departure.
“They hunted mainly gazelles, probably with flint points that they fabricated”
In Misliya cave on Mount Carmel in Israel, they found the upper jawbone and teeth of a human. The remains are between 177,000 and 194,000 years old (Science, ).
Like all hominins at that time, the people of Misliya cave were hunter-gatherers, says co-author Mina Weinstein-Evron of the University of Haifa, Israel. “They hunted mainly gazelles, probably with flint points that they fabricated.”
“The hominins from Skhul were considered the first outside Africa,” says Hershkovitz. “Now we know it is not the case.” He thinks the area was continuously settled for thousands of years.
Experts have broadly accepted the findings. “The first forays out of Africa were clearly earlier than previously thought, and it may be that there were multiple dispersals,” says Julia Galway-Witham of the Natural History Museum in London.
A year ago, the Misliya jawbone might have been controversial. Then, the oldest known H. sapiens remains, from Omo Kibish in Ethiopia, were 195,000 years old. But in 2017, it emerged that skulls from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco were from H. sapiens and were 315,000 years old (see Map).
“Our species is much older than we previously thought,” says Hershkovitz. So it makes sense that we left Africa earlier.
We may find older H. sapiens remains outside Africa, says Galway-Witham. “Genetic studies of Neanderthal DNA indicate that there was… interbreeding between H. sapiens and Neanderthals between about 460,000 and 219,000 years ago,” she says. Neanderthals are only known to have lived in Europe and Asia, so this interbreeding seems likely to have happened outside Africa.
A second study offers tentative support for that. Shanti Pappu of the Sharma Centre for Heritage Education in Chennai, India, and her colleagues have excavated a site called Attirampakkam in southern India. They found 7261 stone tools buried in sediment.
Some are Lower Palaeolithic tools, used by early hominins until about 200,000 years ago. But other tools are smaller and more finely crafted. Such tools are often attributed to our species and relatives like Neanderthals.
These more advanced Middle Palaeolithic tools were found in layers that are between 385,000 and 172,000 years old (Nature, ). That is roughly when such tools appeared in Africa and Europe, but is earlier than they have been seen in Asia. “We thought the Middle Palaeolithic in India began maybe 125,000 years ago,” says Pappu.
It is unclear who made the tools. “We don’t have any hominin fossils at the site,” says Pappu. It is possible it was H. sapiens, making an early exit from Africa, as Galway-Witham suggests. Neanderthals could also have been responsible.
An early foray from Africa helps us understand aspects of our prehistory. For instance, in July 2017 it emerged that humans were in Australia 65,000 years ago. That is hard to explain if humans left Africa only 70,000 years ago, but possible with an earlier exit.
There are also claims that humans lived in China before 100,000 years ago. One specimen from there, the Dali skull, has been dated to 260,000 years ago. Archaeologists have been sceptical it is H. sapiens, but the idea now looks less outlandish.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Humanity’s early exodus from Africa”
