A replica skull of a species belonging to the human family tree whose remnants were first discovered in a South African cave in 2013. (AAP)

Researchers have long believed humans split from apes some five million years ago in Africa, but a study suggests it happened in Europe far earlier than that.

Just where the last common ancestor between chimps - our closest relatives - and humans existed is a matter of hot debate in the scientific community.

The new hypothesis, released on Monday, says the origin of mankind is based on 7.2 million-year-old pre-human remains found in caves in Greece and Bulgaria.

Researchers from France, Germany, Bulgaria, Greece, Canada and Australia analyzed the dental roots of two known specimens of the fossil hominid Graecopithecus freybergi.

Using a specialized X-ray known as computer tomography to scan a lower jaw from Greece and an upper premolar from Bulgaria, they found characteristics suggesting these ape like creatures - nicknamed "El Graeco" - were likely pre-humans, or hominids.

"We were surprised by our results, as pre-humans were previously known only from sub-Saharan Africa," said co-author Jochen Fuss, a researcher at the University of Tubingen.

The findings also showed Graecopithecus is far older than the oldest known potential pre-human from Africa -- Sahelanthropus from Chad, which is six or seven million years old.

The fossil in Greece was dated to 7.24 million years, while the Bulgarian one was 7.175 million years old, said the report in the journal PLOS ONE.

"This dating allows us to move the human-chimpanzee split into the Mediterranean area," said co-author David Begun, a University of Toronto paleoanthropologist.

Environmental changes may have helped drive the evolution of pre-human species, separate from apes, said co-author Madelaine Bohme, a professor of human evolution at the University of Tubingen.

"The incipient formation of a desert in North Africa more than seven million years ago and the spread of savannahs in Southern Europe may have played a central role in the splitting of the human and chimpanzee lineages," said Bohme.

The two fossils were found in sediment that contained red-colored silts "and could be classified as desert dust," said the report.

"These data document for the first time a spreading Sahara 7.2 million years ago, whose desert storms transported red, salty dusts to the north coast of the Mediterranean Sea in its then form," it said.

Severe droughts and wildfires may have forced apes to seek out new food sources, and begin walking upright more often. </s> Ancient tooth fossils found in Europe may represent a new chapter in the human origin story.

The fossils, which date back more than 7 million years, belonged to an ape-like creature named Graecopithecus freybergi, researchers hypothesized in two new papers. A lower jaw bone and upper premolar were found in Greece and Bulgaria, respectively.

The findings suggest that humans split off from great apes several hundred thousand years earlier than previously thought, according to research published this week in the journal PLOS ONE.

If true, that would mean the first pre-humans developed in Mediterranean Europe — not in sub-Saharan Africa, which is widely considered the birthplace of early humans.

Still, the studies alone aren't enough to rewrite the story of humankind's beginnings.

Outside experts say they are deeply skeptical of the research. They argue the evidence is still too thin to upend decades' worth of fossil and genetic discoveries in Africa.

"The new claims about Graecopithecus need to be treated with a good deal of caution," Darren Curnoe, an associate professor at the University of New South Wales Sydney, wrote in an opinion piece for The Conversation.

"I'm open to the idea that early humans lived beyond Africa, but Graecopithecus falls well short of proving it," he said.

Many researchers assume that human and ape lineages diverged some 5 to 7 million years ago. Charles Darwin initially surmised that humans evolved in Africa, because that's the home of humans' closest ape relatives, chimpanzees and gorillas.

The oldest potential pre-human, a 6- to 7-million-year old named Sahelanthropus, was found in present-day Chad. But the Graecopithecus — nicknamed "El Graeco" — may be even older, according to an international team of researchers.

The Bulgarian premolar dates back some 7.24 million years ago, and the Greek jaw fossil dates back 7.175 million years ago, they said.

The teams were led by Madelaine Böhme from the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment in Germany and Nikolai Spassov from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

Researchers used computer tomography to take cross-sections of the two fossils. They found the roots of premolars were widely fused, a feature that is characteristic of modern humans, early humans, and several pre-human ancestors. Great apes, by contrast, have two or three separate and diverging premolar roots.

The lower jaw fossil also had additional dental root features that suggested its owner belonged to the pre-human lineage.

"We were surprised by our results, as pre-humans were previously known only from sub-Saharan Africa," Jochen Fuss, a doctoral student at the University of Tübingen in Germany who conducted this part of the study, said in a press release.

But Curnoe, the skeptical professor, said studying just one feature — dental roots — on a small number of fossils wasn't enough to prove El Graeco was on Team Human, not Team Ape.

"While our place in the tree of life is now well established — chimpanzees being our closest relatives — the beginning of the human line millions of years ago continues to be shrouded in mystery," he noted. </s> For the last century scientists have assumed that the lineages of man and ape diverged five to seven million years ago and that the first pre-humans developed in Africa. But the dating of a 7.2million year old pre-human tooth in the Balkans has thrown fresh doubt on the Africa theory. Present-day chimpanzees are humans' nearest living relatives and where the last chimp-human common ancestor lived is a central and highly debated issue in palaeoanthropology.

New research in the scientific journal PLOS ONE has further indicated that the split of the human lineage occurred in the Eastern Mediterranean and not - as customarily assumed - in Africa. The team, led by academics from the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment, the University of Tübingen and the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, announced the discovery after analysing two specimens of the fossil hominid Graecopithecus freybergi. Although the species was already known, the discovery of a jawbone in Greece and a tooth in Bulgaria has allowed scientists to study them using modern techniques.

The research team found that the fossils were several hundred thousand years older than the oldest potential pre-human from Africa, the six to seven million year old Sahelanthropus from Chad. They dated the two finds by comparing the rocks they were in, or sedimentary sequence of the sites and got a nearly identical age for both fossils - 7.24 and 7.175 million years before present. Using computer tomography, they also visualised the internal structures of the fossils and found that its teeth roots were fused like modern man's. Professor Madelaine Bahme said: "While great apes typically have two or three separate and diverging roots, the roots of Graecopithecus converge and are partially fused - a feature that is characteristic of modern humans, early humans and several pre-humans including Ardipithecus and Australopithecus."

Tübingen PhD student Jochen Fuss who worked on the study said: "We were surprised by our results, as pre-humans were previously known only from sub-Saharan Africa." University of Toronto Professor David Begun added: "This dating allows us to move the human-chimpanzee split into the Mediterranean area." As with the out-of-East-Africa theory, the evolution of pre-humans may have been driven by dramatic environmental changes. Prof Bahme added: "The incipient formation of a desert in North Africa more than seven million years ago and the spread of savannahs in Southern Europe may have played a central role in the splitting of the human and chimpanzee lineages." The findings are described in two studies published in PLOS ONE titled "Potential hominin affinities of Graecopithecus from the late Miocene of Europe" and "Messinian age and savannah environment of the possible hominin Graecopithecus from Europe." </s> Researchers have claimed that a broken skull found from a cave in Greece is the oldest modern human fossil ever found outside Africa, The Guardian reported.

The partial skull was discovered in the Apidima cave on the Mani peninsula in southern Greece and is estimated to be at least 2,10,000 years old, becoming the oldest known modern human fossil in Europe.

A second skull found in the Grecian cave belonged to a Neanderthal who lived 1,70,000 years ago, according to a new study published in Nature. Researchers believe that finding both skulls in the same cave illustrate that early humans migrated in multiple stages out of Africa rather than a single event, CNN reported. Southeast Europe is considered to be a major migration corridor out of Africa.

“Our results indicate that an early dispersal of Homo sapiens out of Africa occurred earlier than previously believed, before 2,00,000 years ago,” said Katerina Harvati, the director of paleoanthropology at the University of Tübingen in Germany. “We’re seeing evidence for human dispersals that are not just limited to one major exodus out of Africa.” Harvati is among the authors of the study.

The skulls were discovered in 1978 when the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens was conducting research, according to CNN. They were found in a block of broken fragments of rock and fossil cemented together and wedged between the walls of the Apidima Cave.

The skulls were stored in a museum in Athens, but received little attention as they were damaged and incomplete. The second skull, which retains a face, was studied the most and identified as Neanderthal, according to The Guardian. The first skull, consisting only of the back of the skull, was largely ignored,

Harvati and her colleagues took CT scans of the fossils and created virtual 3D reconstructions. The models were then compared with skulls from various ancient Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and modern humans. The researchers found that the partial skull closely matched that of a modern human. </s> Our ancestors migrated to Europe some 150,000 years earlier than we thought.

Recent analysis of a Homo sapiens skull, discovered decades ago in Greece, dates the cranium to about 210,000 years ago.

Which makes it the earliest modern human known outside Africa.

A pair of partial skulls uncovered from Apidima Cave in southern Greece in 1978 were initially believed to be at least 160,000 years old.

Named Apidima 1 and Apidima 2, the fragments were reportedly wedged so high between two walls that they lacked any context to make dating more accurate.

Four decades of doubt later, a new international team of researchers took matters into their own hands—er, labs.

Based on the skull shapes alone, it is clear there are significant differences: Apidima 2 is more complete and shows similarities to Neanderthals, while Apidima 1 is reminiscent of modern human fossils.

“When we submitted the first draft of our paper for possible publication, the reviewers were naturally skeptical,” Chris Stringer, a merit researcher at London’s Natural History Museum, said in a statement. “So we conducted further analyses and dating work, which produced even more surprises.”

New dating of the Neanderthal-esque Apidima 2 fell in line with previous estimates: about 170,000 years old.

Apidima 1, however, appears to belong to a much earlier time frame: at least 210,000 years ago.

“Our results suggest that at least two groups of people lived in the Middle Pleistocene in what is now southern Greece: an early population of Homo sapiens and, later, a group of Neanderthals,” lead study author Katerina Harvati, from the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Paleoenvironment at the University of Tübingen in Germany, explained.

Moving forward, researchers will continue studying Apidima material, excavated in the 1970s and ’80s by the Museum of Anthropology of the Medical School of the University of Athens.

This discovery could change the course of history altogether.

“If these latest analyses are correct, H. sapiens entered Europe over 150,000 years earlier than we thought,” Stringer said, “raising a whole new range of questions and possibilities, including where they came from and what happened to them.”

A full study was published this week in the journal Nature.
• None New Species of Ancient Human Discovered in Philippine Cave </s> A 210,000-year-old skull has been identified as the earliest modern human remains found outside Africa, putting the clock back on mankind’s arrival in Europe by more than 150,000 years, researchers said.

In a startling discovery that changes our understanding of how modern man populated Eurasia, the findings support the idea that Homo sapiens made several, sometimes unsuccessful migrations from Africa over tens of thousands of years.

Southeast Europe has long been considered a major transport corridor for modern humans from Africa. But until now the earliest evidence of Homo sapiens on the continent dated back only around 50,000 years.

There has however been a number of discoveries indicating the ancient presence of Neanderthals — an early human cousin — across the continent.

Two fossilised but badly damaged skulls unearthed in a Greek cave in the 1970s were identified as Neanderthal at the time.

In findings presented in the journal Nature, an international team of researchers used state-of-the art computer modelling and uranium dating to re-examine the two skulls.

One of them, named Apidima 2 after the cave in which the pair were found, proved to be 170,000 years old and did indeed belong to a Neanderthal.

But, to the shock of scientists, the skull named Apidima 1 predated Apidima 2 by as much as 40,000 years, and was determined to be that of a Homo sapiens.

That makes the skull by far the oldest modern human remains ever discovered on the continent, and older than any known Homo sapiens specimen outside of Africa.

“It shows that the early dispersal of Homo sapiens out of Africa not only occurred earlier, before 200,000 years ago, but also reached further geographically, all the way to Europe,” Katerina Harvati, a palaeoanthropologist at the Eberhard Karls University of Tuebingen, Germany, told AFP.

“This is something that we did not suspect before, and which has implications for the population movements of these ancient groups.” Apidima 1 lacked classic features associated with Neanderthal skulls, including the distinctive bulge at the back of the head, shaped like hair tied in a bun.

Hominins — a subset of great apes that includes Homo sapiens and Neanderthals — are believed to have emerged in Africa more than six million years ago. They left the continent in several migration waves starting about two million years ago.

The oldest known African fossil attributed to a member of the Homo family is a 2.8 million-year-old jawbone from Ethiopia.

Homo sapiens replaced Neanderthals across Europe for good around 45,000-35,000 years ago, in what was long considered a gradual takeover of the continent involving millennia of coexistence and even interbreeding.

But the skull discovery in Greece suggests that Homo sapiens undertook the migration from Africa to southern Europe on “more than one occasion”, according to Eric Delson, a professor of anthropology at City University of New York.

“Rather than a single exit of hominins from Africa to populate Eurasia, there must have been several dispersals, some of which did not result in permanent occupations,” said Delson, who was not involved in the Nature study.

Harvati said advances in dating and genetics technology could continue to shape our understanding of how our prehistoric ancestors spread throughout the world.

“I think recent advances in palaeoanthropology have shown that the field is still full of surprises,” she said. </s> Chimpanzees are humans' nearest living relatives, but where the last chimp-human common ancestor lived has been debated for years by anthropologists.

Researchers in the Balkans have now discovered 7.2 million-year-old fossils, which they believe belonged to pre-humans.

The findings suggest that the split of the human lineage occurred in the Eastern Mediterranean and not - as customarily assumed - in Africa.

For decades, scientists have thought that humans originated in Africa. Modern humans (Homo sapiens) likely split from an apelike ancestor in east Africa around 200,000 years ago, the theory suggests. These early humans colonised the planet by spreading out of Africa around 50,000 years ago. The theory is popular because almost all of the fossils of early humans who lived between 6 and 2 million years ago come from Africa. But new studies analysing 7.2 million-year-old teeth found in Greece and Bulgaria suggest that the animals were pre-human ancestors. This means that modern humans could have originated in the Mediterranean and not Africa.

Until now, researchers have assumed that the lineages between great apes and humans diverged five to seven million years ago and that the first pre-humans developed in Africa.

But two studies by an international team of researchers led by the University of Toronto outline a new scenario for the beginning of human history.

The team analysed two known specimens of the fossil hominid Graecopithecus freybergi - a lower jaw from Pyrgos Vassilissis, Greece and an upper premolar from Azmaka, Bulgaria.

Using computer scanning, they were able to visualise the internal structures of the fossils and demonstrated that the roots of premolars are widely fused.

Professor Madelaine Böhme, who led the study, said: 'While great apes typically have two or three separate and diverging roots, the roots of Graecopithecus converge and are partially fused - a feature that is characteristic of modern humans, early humans and several pre-humans including Ardipithecus and Australopithecus.'

The lower jaw, which the scientists have nicknamed 'El Graeco', has additional dental root features, suggesting that the Graecopithecus freybergi might belong to the pre-human lineage.

Mr Jochen Fuss, who also worked on the study, said: 'We were surprised by our results, as pre-humans were previously known only from sub-Saharan Africa.'

An analysis showed that the Graecopithecus fossils were 7.24 and 7.175 million years old – several hundred thousand years older than the oldest potential pre-human from Africa, the six to seven million year old Sahelanthropus from Chad.

Professor David Begun, co-author of the study, added: 'This dating allows us to move the human-chimpanzee split into the Mediterranean area.'

The researchers believe that the evolution of pre-humans may have been driven by dramatic environmental changes.

WAS THE ORIGIN OF MAN MULTI-REGIONAL? One theory on the origin of man suggests that modern humans developed in multiple regions around the world. The theory claims that groups of a pre-human ancestor made their way out of Africa and spread across parts of Europe and the Middle East. From here the species developed into modern humans in several places at once. According to the multi-regional theory, different races arose in different regions as a result of natural selection as these populations evolved into modern humans. The argument is supported by fossil evidence of early and pre-human ancestors found across Europe and the Middle East over the past 100 years. But some scientists question whether these bones belonged to true pre-human ancestors or just early humans that had travelled from Africa. The two new teeth studies add fresh evidence to the multi-regional theory.

Based on geological analyses of the sediments in which the two fossils were found, the researchers found that the North African Sahara desert originated more than seven million years ago.

Although geographically distant from the Sahara, an analysis of uranium, thorium, and lead isotopes in individual dust particles showed an age between 0.6 and three billion years and suggests an origin in Northern Africa.

The dusty sediment also had a high content of different salts.

The researchers said: 'These data document for the first time a spreading Sahara 7.2 million years ago, whose desert storms transported red, salty dusts to the north coast of the Mediterranean Sea in its then form.'

WAS EVOLUTION DRIVEN BY WEATHER CHANGES? The researchers believe that the evolution of pre-humans may have been driven by dramatic environmental changes. Based on analyses of the sediments in which the two fossils were found, the researchers found that the North African Sahara desert originated more than seven million years ago. Although geographically distant from the Sahara, an analysis of uranium, thorium, and lead isotopes in individual dust particles showed an age between 0.6 and three billion years and suggests an origin in Northern Africa. The dusty sediment also had a high content of different salts. The researchers said: 'These data document for the first time a spreading Sahara 7.2 million years ago, whose desert storms transported red, salty dusts to the north coast of the Mediterranean Sea in its then form.'

Before the development of the Sahara in North Africa, the researchers believe that Europe was a vast savannah.

The researchers studied microscopic fragments of charcoal and plant particles, called phytoliths.

Many of the phytoliths studied were found to derive from tropical grasslands and savannahs.

The study marks the first time that such grasses have been discovered in Europe.

Professor Nikolai Spassov, who also worked on the study, said: 'In summary, we reconstruct a savannah, which fits with the giraffes, gazelles, antelopes, and rhinoceroses that were found together with Graecopithecus.'

Professor Böhme added: 'The incipient formation of a desert in North Africa more than seven million years ago and the spread of savannahs in Southern Europe may have played a central role in the splitting of the human and chimpanzee lineages.'

She calls this hypothesis the North Side Story, recalling the early thesis of French palaeoanthropologist, Yves Coppens, known as East Side Story.

15 million years ago - Hominidae (great apes) evolve from the ancestors of the gibbon 8 million years ago - First gorillas evolve. Later, chimp and human lineages diverge 4 million years ago - Ape like early humans, the Australopithecines appeared. They had brains no larger than a chimpanzee's but other more human like features 2.7 million years ago - Paranthropus, lived in woods and had massive jaws for chewing 2.3 million years ago - Homo habalis first thought to have appeared in Africa 1.8 million years ago - Homo ergaster begins to appear in fossil record 1.6 million years ago - Hand axes become the first major technological innovation 400,000 years ago - Neanderthals first begin to appear and spread across Europe and Asia </s> A 210,000-year-old human skull could provide new evidence that our species left Africa much earlier than previously thought. A new study published in Nature of two fossils found in Greece in the 1970s shows that one of them is the oldest Homo sapiens specimen ever found outside Africa by more than 50,000 years.

This exciting discovery adds to a list of recent finds that shows the story of humanity's spread across the world and interaction with other related species is much more complicated than we once thought.

The human skull was one of two cranial fossils found in Apidima Cave, one of a series of cave sites along the southwestern coast of the Peloponnese in Greece. The first, known as Apidima 1, comprised half of the rear of a skull case. Apidima 2 was a largely complete skull with a clear face, but had been heavily distorted during the fossilisation process.

Both were initially identified as Neanderthals and, as uncontroversial specimens, disappeared into the general table of fossils from humans and their closest extinct relatives (hominins).

But the recent study from a multinational team led by Katerina Harvati reconstructed the specimens digitally and dated them by measuring their radioactive decay. "Geometric-morphometric" analysis allowed the researchers to reverse model the distortions of Apidima 2 to estimate what it would have originally looked like. This confirmed it was an early Neanderthal dating from around 150,000 years ago.

They also digitally recreated what the whole of the Apidima 1 skull would have looked like and realised it was more likely a modern human (Homo sapiens), dating it to 210,000 years ago.

Human evolution is often thought of as a linear story of new species developing and replacing older, simpler ones. This narrative originally said that modern humans in the southern cape of Africa developed a suite of original ways of thinking and communicating approximately 80,000 years ago.

They dispersed out of Africa and across the world, sweeping all before them from about 70,000 years ago, leading to the demise of Neanderthals in Europe around 40,000 years ago.

But this narrative has grown ever more difficult to sustain because of a range of new fossil discoveries, improvements in their dating and genetic evidence. We now know that modern humans have existed for at least 300,000 years, thanks to a fossil from the site of Jebel Irhoud in Morocco. But they didn't form a single population with a coherent pattern of behaviour before they left the continent.

Specimens from sites in the Levant (modern day Israel, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan) suggest the first wave of modern humans out of Africa were replaced by Neanderthals, before the final, more successful human migration later on.

In southern Africa, modern humans were alive at the same time as a much smaller and seemingly more primitive species called Homo naledi. Genetic evidence from Siberia and recently Tibet has identified a new hominin species – the Denisovans – that shared a history of interbreeding and interaction with Neanderthals. And the presence of Neanderthal DNA in our own genomes shows they also bred with our species.

The new data from Apidima further extends this complex picture of modern human dispersal and interaction with other hominin species. For example, the earlier human skull came from a time when the surrounding environment was warmer and wetter than the cold and arid conditions the later Neanderthal specimen would have lived in.

This emphasises that our explanations for population dispersals need to take into account the context of major environmental change and the opportunities and challenges that went with it.

Our traditional narratives and implicit assumptions of the evolutionary history of modern humans are well and truly broken. The ever-increasing complexity of the evidence we now have means there is no simple reason for hominin dispersal or replacement.

We now need a renewed emphasis on the archaeological evidence to understand and compare what hominins were actually doing in the landscapes where we find their remains. This will enable us to explore the nature of their interactions and not just narrate their consequences.

Anthony Sinclair is Professor of Archaeological Theory and Method at the University of Liverpool. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. </s> A few fossilized bones from the back of a skull may prove that our species spread into Eurasia much earlier than previously suspected. A new study of the partial skull, which was excavated from Apidima Cave in southern Greece 40 years ago, suggests that the fossil is Homo sapiens and that it’s roughly 210,000 years old. That makes it the oldest member of our species ever found outside of Africa.

The fossil, known as Apidima 1, is likely the remains of a member of an early wave of humans who spread into Eurasia. Based on genetic studies and the fossil record, anthropologists think these early pioneers failed to gain a successful foothold and ended up being replaced by Neanderthals (for a while, at least).

A new look at an old skull

Archaeologists excavating Apidima Cave in the 1970s found the partial skull lodged in a chunk of breccia, just a few centimeters away from a broken and distorted Neanderthal skull called Apidima 2, which dated to 170,000 years old. For decades, archaeologists assumed Apidima 1 was a Neanderthal, too. But Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen paleoanthropologist Katerina Harvati and her colleagues recently took a second look at Apidima 1. The partial skull included just the right pieces of bone to reveal something important: the skull was rounded at the back—a feature that’s unique to Homo sapiens.

And according to uranium-series dating, the skull could be as much as 210,000 years old. That’s a few thousand years older than Misliya-1, the previous holder of the Oldest Human Outside Africa title (at 194,000 to 177,000 years old). It fits pretty well with the growing pile of evidence that the earliest humans (like many of our hominin relatives) spread farther and faster than anthropologists have previously given them credit for.

“We never imagined anything like this for this area, but in hindsight, it's not actually a very surprising result,” said Harvati. Evidence of Homo sapiens in Israel dates to at least 177,000 years ago, and southeastern Europe was probably an important route from the Levant into Europe and parts of Asia. “It’s not actually so unimaginable that some of these populations would have expanded their range to reach southeast Europe,” said Harvati.

Harvati and her colleagues CT scanned the bone so they could digitally reconstruct the broken, distorted pieces of skull, then performed statistical analysis of how its dimensions and shape compared to other fossil skulls from humans, Neanderthals, and even older hominins. Consistently, the analysis suggested that Apidima 1 was human.

But that’s not to say there won’t be some debate, especially about the fossil’s age. Most calcium carbonate rocks, minerals that precipitate out of flowing water, also contain some uranium. By looking at the ratios of uranium isotopes in a rock or fossil, geochemists can date when it formed. In this case, Harvati and her colleagues came up with several potential dates, some of which are much earlier than 210,000 years ago. Geochemist Rainer Grün of Griffith University says that those earlier dates are probably the product of uranium from the breccia deposit—where the partial skull ended up after being washed through the cave sometime after death—leaching into the fossil bone over time.

It’s pretty common for paleoanthropologists to re-analyze, re-date, and argue about fossils, especially when they’re the centerpiece of a superlative claim like this one. Although Apidima 1 isn’t that much older than Misliya-1, it’s the oldest Homo sapiens fossil in Europe by a margin of about 150,000 years, and that’s a significant claim. It’s probably reasonable to expect to hear more about Apidima 1 in the future, one way or another.

“It's a fantastic coincidence that you have two skulls together, 30cm (11.8 inches) apart,” said Grün. “In all of Greece, you have one more skull—that’s it—in that timeframe. It's a wonder of nature that you find the two together.” The human and the Neanderthal probably died around 40,000 years apart, in different places in the labyrinthine Apidima cave system. At some point, water flowing through the cave washed both skulls down into the same chamber. The uranium isotope ratios in Apidima 1 were different from the surrounding rock, suggesting that they started out in different places and formed at different times. The Neanderthal’s signature, meanwhile, was more similar to the surrounding breccia.

The result may offer an uncanny fossil snapshot of our complicated history with the Neanderthals. Genetic studies of Neanderthal DNA have suggested that those living in Europe sometime after 270,000 years ago met early waves of human migrants. Those encounters left traces of human alleles in Neanderthal genomes, in the same way that Neanderthals, in turn, left traces in our modern genomes. Harvati says that Apidima 1 may be part of that long-lost group of humans who mingled with Neanderthals and then, apparently, disappeared.

Genetic evidence suggests that non-African populations today all descend from the wave of humans who dispersed into the rest of the world between 70,000 and 50,000 years ago. Older waves of dispersal, humans who left tools and bones at sites like Misliya, Qafzeh, and Skhul Caves in Israel, seem to have faded away without leaving descendants behind. And at several of those sites in Israel, the fossil record contains Homo sapiens remains in earlier layers, followed by Neanderthals in later ones. That suggests that somehow, Neanderthals temporarily replaced humans living in the area. Something similar likely happened to the first wave (or waves) of humans in Europe, as well.

“I would suspect that these were relatively small populations that made it all the way to Greece—for example, probably smaller than the source population in Israel, and of course ultimately from Africa,” said Harvati. Smaller groups would have been more vulnerable to local extinction. The first Homo sapiens may have arrived in the Levant and Europe to find Neanderthals already living there, and they co-existed for awhile before somehow dying out. Or perhaps the humans moved into unoccupied territory, only to later be edged out or absorbed by groups of Neanderthals migrating into the same region.

But for now, paleoanthropologists don’t know exactly what transpired between the two species, or why—just as they don’t know exactly why the Neanderthals went extinct around 40,000 years ago. They need more evidence to tackle those questions and to understand exactly when, where, and why our species began to explore the world outside Africa. That means looking for more fossils, of course, but it also means prying more information out of the fossil record that’s already sitting in museums and university collections.

“I think the questions that will be asked now are what caused this early dispersal? What enabled it in terms of land bridges or particular routes of dispersal? Were there any technological advances that enabled such a far geographic intrusion into Europe?” said Harvati. “And also why did they die out?”

Harvati and her colleagues plan to try to find ancient DNA and proteins in the skulls from Apidima Cave, though she admits she’s not optimistic because the fossils are so old and the site is in such a warm region. Heat seldom bodes well for DNA preservation.

Meanwhile, Greece, like much of southeastern Europe, hasn’t exactly been a hotspot for paleoanthropology—despite its geographic importance. That’s mostly because archaeology in the region has been more focused on much later periods of human history. Paleoanthropology has started to get more attention in recent years, though, and that may eventually yield more finds like Apidima 1.

“We did not suspect this, so it's possible that we will find [early human fossils] also elsewhere. It's possible that they reached further than we thought before,” said Harvati. We can only answer this by finding more evidence.”
Scientists discover 7.2 million-year-old "pre-human" remains in the Balkans area near Bulgaria and Greece.