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 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.” </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> 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> There is a lot we don’t know about human history. Where did we come from? Who did we come from? And how did we get to where we are now? Well, we may have some answers — or, at least, more specific questions — as scientists have identified the oldest human remains outside of Africa known to modern science. The finding may shift the story of prehistoric humans.

In the 1970s, scientists uncovered a fragment of a skull fossil in a cave in Greece. Thanks to modern dating technology, researchers have now been able to put a timestamp on this fossil. This new skull is 210,000 years old. For context, the earliest evidence of homo sapiens was 50,000 years ago in Southeast Europe, making this new skull fossil more than four times older than previous evidence suggested. Here’s where things get a little confusing. (As if understanding how we can date a piece of a fragment of a fossil hundreds of thousands of years ago weren’t confusing enough...but I digress.)

The research, published in the scientific journal Nature, found two different types of skull fragments, which they call Apidima 1 and Apidima 2 in their study. “Apidima 2 dates to more than 170 thousand years ago and has a Neanderthal-like morphological pattern,” the study explains. “By contrast, Apidima 1 dates to more than 210 thousand years ago and presents a mixture of modern human and primitive features.”

In other words, the finding suggests there was a more modern Homo sapien population that existed before a more prehistoric Neanderthal population.

“Our findings support multiple dispersals of early modern humans out of Africa, and highlight the complex demographic processes that characterized Pleistocene human evolution and modern human presence in southeast Europe,” the study continues. Apidima 2, the Neanderthal, was discovered to be older than the previous estimate. The same was true of Apidima 1, the Homo sapiens skull, as researchers realized it was actually more than 40,000 years older than Apidima 2.

One of the identifying features of Neanderthals and extinct human relatives like them is a skull that bulgest outward in the back. “It looks like when you put your hair up in a bun,” Dr. Katerina Harvati, lead study author of Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, told the New York Times.

Homo sapiens and more modern human ancestors, however, have a more rounded back of the skull. After digitally rebuilding the skull from the fragment that was found in the ‘70s, researchers realized the back of Apidima 1’s skull was round.

“It is very exciting!” Dr. Harvati told National Geographic. “It is gratifying to see that my hypotheses about the importance of the region for human evolution are supported by our findings.”

This is also exciting for hair history: man buns come and go. Hair fashion is a flat circle.

“As with any challenging new find, the appropriate initial reaction should be a healthy skepticism, even when my own name is on the paper,” study author Chris Stringer said in a tweet. For example, researcher don’t have the parts of the skull like the frontal bone, brow ridge, teeth, or chin region, which Stringer notes could have been “less ‘modern’ in form.” Stringer continues, “However, we tested the reconstruction in various ways, and we have compared it with a large range of other human fossils, to increase the resolving power of our analyses.”

This new research poses a lot of questions about where early human descendants migrated from. Dr. Harvati, lead author of the new study, told the Times said that “it’s impossible to say how long the earliest Europeans endured on the Continent, or why they disappeared.”

“It’s a very good question, and I have no idea,” Dr. Harvati said. “I mean, this is the first time that we’ve found them.” Here's hoping we find another fragment that adds a piece to the ever-growing puzzle that is human history. </s> Two skulls found in a Grecian cave paint a surprising portrait of who lived there hundreds of thousands of years ago. One fragmentary skull has been dated to 210,000 years ago, and researchers believe that it is the earliest evidence of modern humans living in Eurasia, according to a new study. The other, more complete skull belonged to a Neanderthal who lived 170,000 years ago.

Finding both in the same cave illustrates that multiple early migrations out of Africa, rather than a single event, helped early humans spread, according to the researchers. Southeast Europe is considered to be one of those major migration corridors out of Africa.

The study was published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.

Both skulls were found in a block of breccia, or broken fragments of rock and fossil cemented together, wedged high between the walls of the Apidima Cave in southern Greece. The skulls were discovered in 1978, when the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens was conducting research.

The breccia was dated to between 100,000 and 190,000 years old at the time. The skulls were not removed from the breccia and remained at the museum. Given the fragmentary nature of the skulls, they were difficult to remove and clean, though that eventually happened in the 1990s.

Apidima 1 was in pieces, and Apidima 2, the most complete skull belonging to the Neanderthal, was distorted. At the time, researchers focused on the latter. It had all of the characteristics of a Neanderthal, like a thick and rounded brow ridge.

Researcher Katerina Harvati and her colleagues, who focus on reevaluating the existing fossil record with cutting-edge dating techniques, were invited to study the Apidima fossils.

They scanned the fossils and created 3D reconstructions of them. The shape of each skull was compared with those of other species from the fossil record.

Apidima 2, which is essentially just the facial region of a skull without the lower jaw, matched yet again as a Neanderthal skull, despite its distortion.

Apidima 1, just the back of a skull, was fragmented but not distorted, so the researchers were able to use mirroring to re-create it.

The researchers were surprised to find all of the signatures of an early member of the Homo sapiens family in the Apidima 1 skull. The rounded back is just like a modern human's; Neanderthals have a bulge at the back of the skull that almost resembles a hair bun.

The oldest known fossils of early humans were found at Jebel Irhoud in Morocco, dating to 315,000 years ago. But the Jebel Irhoud fossils display more primitive features than Apidima 1.

Apidima 1 is now the oldest known European modern human fossil, 160,000 years older than previous discoveries.

The researchers also used uranium-series dating to determine the ages of each skull, putting Apidima 1 at 210,000 years old and Apidima 2 at 170,000 years old. Previously, it had been assumed they would both be the same age, given that they were found in the same breccia and only the breccia was initially dated.

But the cave system where they were found allowed for the remains of humans and animals from different time periods to accumulate.

The cave is reachable only by water now. At the time when modern humans and Neanderthals lived there separately, sea levels were lower. The cave overlooked a coastal plain that was probably perfect for hunting, while the cave itself provided shelter. Southern Greece would have been attractive during glacial times, offering a milder climate, the researchers said.

Given the fact that the modern human skull is older than the Neanderthal skull, which was unexpected, researchers believe that a group of modern humans lived in the area but didn't thrive. Climactic events or competition from Neanderthals caused them to die off, leaving no genetic trace behind in the population. Without further evidence, it's difficult to know what happened to them.

Then, Neanderthals lived in the area. And about 40,000 years ago, the last of the Neanderthals died off, and modern humans thrived.

Previous discoveries of early modern human fossils in Israel, dated between 90,000 and 194,000 years ago, could also represent populations that failed to thrive after leaving Africa.

Many questions remain for the researchers. They want to know the underlying cause for the early migrations, if there were technological advancements that allowed for those migrations and why some of the modern human populations didn't persist in the areas where they migrated.

They were also unable to recover DNA from the skulls but will analyze ancient proteins that could be preserved in the fossil, a method known as palaeoproteomics. </s> Image copyright Katerina Harvati, Eberhard Karls Uni Tüb Image caption Apidima 1 (shown here in a reconstruction) has all the characteristics of a modern human skull

Researchers have found the earliest example of our species (modern humans) outside Africa.

A skull unearthed in Greece has been dated to 210,000 years ago, at a time when Europe was occupied by the Neanderthals.

The sensational discovery adds to evidence of an earlier migration of people from Africa that left no trace in the DNA of people alive today.

The findings are published in the journal Nature.

"It's about five times older than any other evidence of modern humans in Europe. And obviously it's older even than Misliya from Israel (a 150,000-year-old early modern human fossil). The shape of the back of the skull is very modern looking and it's potentially the oldest fossil that shows this modern look to the back of the skull," Prof Chris Stringer, from London's Natural History Museum, told BBC News.

The earliest proposed Homo sapiens, a 300,000-year-old skull from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco, does not show this rounded, high back.

The latest evidence was uncovered at the site of Apidima Cave in Greece in the 1970s. Two skulls were found; one was very distorted and the other incomplete, however, and it took computed tomography scanning and uranium-series dating to unravel their secrets.

The more complete skull appears to be a Neanderthal. But the other shows clear characteristics, such as a rounded back to the skull, diagnostic of modern humans.

Modern humans left Africa much earlier

What's more, the Neanderthal skull was younger.

"Now our scenario was that there was an early modern group in Greece by 210,000 years ago, perhaps related to comparable populations in the Levant, but it was subsequently replaced by a Neanderthal population (represented by Apidima 2) by about 170,000 years ago," said Prof Stringer.

Image caption Apidima 2 appears to be a Neanderthal and is later than the modern human skull

People living outside Africa today trace their ancestry to a migration that left the continent 60,000 years ago.

As these modern humans expanded across Eurasia, they largely replaced other species they encountered, such as the Neanderthals and Denisovans.

But this wasn't the first migration of modern humans (Homo sapiens) from Africa.

Homo sapiens fossils from Skhul and Qafzeh in Israel were dated in the 1990s to between 90,000 and 125,000 years ago.

These were viewed as anomalies - a brief foray outside our African homeland that came to very little.

However, in recent years, we've come to understand that our species ranged outside Africa even earlier and further than we'd previously believed.

In the last few years, palaeontologists have discovered modern human fossils from Daoxian and Zhirendong in China dating to between 80,000 and 120,000 years ago.

DNA studies have turned up signs of early interbreeding between African humans and Neanderthals. Evidence from German Neanderthals shows that mixing occurred between 219,000 and 460,000 years ago, although it's not clear if Homo sapiens was involved, or another early African group.

"The movement of the people into Europe, that was actually was a warm stage - Marine Isotope Stage 7 - when it did warm up. So that may have been a reason why the population was able to expand into Europe at that time," said Prof Stringer.

"Soon afterwards, we get a much colder stage starting. Possibly, climate change was a reason why the group died out and Neanderthals re-established themselves."

On the affinities of the Apidima 1 skull, Prof Stringer says: "It's obviously only on the parts preserved. We have to be careful, it is only on the back of the skull, the front might have been more primitive, who knows. But going on what we've got it can be diagnosed as a modern human going on the parts preserved.

"If we're right about it, there must be some more evidence of this population and ones like it, still to be discovered."

Follow Paul on Twitter. </s> In the late 1970s, two fossilized human crania were discovered in the Apidima cave in southern Greece. Researchers were somewhat befuddled by the remains; they were incomplete and distorted, for one, and had been found without any archaeological context, like stone tools. But because the skulls had been encased in a single block of stone, experts assumed they were the same age and of the same species—possibly Neanderthals.

Now, a bombshell study published in Nature posits that one of the crania, dubbed “Apidima 1,” in fact belonged to an early modern human that lived 210,000 years ago. The report has been met with skepticism by some experts, but if its conclusions are correct, Apidima 1 represents the oldest Homo sapiens fossil in Europe by some 160,000 years.

For the past 40-odd years, Apidima 1 and the other cranium, “Apidima 2,” have been held at the University of Athen’s Museum of Anthropology. Scientists there recently reached out to Katerina Harvati, director of paleoanthropology at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, to see if she would be interested in taking a fresh look at the skulls, reports Maya Wei-Haas of National Geographic.

Harvati and a team of colleagues analyzed the remains using cutting-edge techniques. First, they CT-scanned both fossils and generated 3D reconstructions in an attempt to get a better picture of what the skulls looked like. Though it had been badly damaged over the centuries, Apidima 2 is the more complete fossil; it includes the facial region, and the new models affirmed previous research indicating that the specimen belonged to a Neanderthal. Apidima 1 consists of just the back of the crania, but the team’s reconstructions and analyses revealed something surprising: the fossil’s features were consistent not with those of Neanderthals, but with those of modern humans.

Tellingly, the Apidima 1 fossil lacks a “chignon,” the distinctive bulge at the back of the skull that is characteristic of Neanderthals. The posterior of the skull is also rounded, which “is considered to be a uniquely modern human feature that evolved relatively late,” Harvati tells Ed Yong of the Atlantic. And when the team dated the fossils by analyzing the radioactive decay of trace uranium in the specimens, they got another shock. Apidima 2 was found to be around 170,000 years old, which is consistent with the age of other Neanderthal fossils in Europe. But Apidima 1 was dated to 210,000 years ago, making it by far the oldest Homo sapiens fossil found on the continent.

“I couldn’t believe it at first,” Harvati tells Yong, “but all the analyses we conducted gave the same result.”

This discovery may add a wrinkle to the commonly accepted timeline of modern humans’ dispersal from Africa and arrival in Europe. It is widely accepted that our species evolved in Africa—the oldest known Homo sapiens fossils were found in Morocco and date back 315,000 years ago—and first ventured out of the continent between 70,000 and 60,000 years ago. All the while, Neanderthals were evolving in Europe, genetically isolated from other hominid species. Homo sapiens are thought to have arrived on the scene around 45,000 years ago, interbreeding with Neanderthals and eventually emerging as the dominant species.

But the authors of the new study contend that their findings “support multiple dispersals of early modern humans out of Africa.” Given that no similarly old human fossils have been found in Europe, it is possible that Apidima 1 belonged to a population that could not compete with the continent’s resident Neanderthals, paleoanthropologist Eric Delson writes in a Nature article about the new paper. “Perhaps one or more times, the two species replaced each other as the main hominin group present in this region,” Delson adds.

There have been signs that other “failed” human groups were migrating out of Africa at a relatively early date. Last year, for instance, researchers announced the discovery of a 175,000 year old jawbone in Israel, which appeared to belong to a member of Homo sapiens. At the time, the specimen was hailed as “by far the oldest human fossil ever uncovered outside Africa.” Apidima 1 is even older, and “indicates that early modern humans dispersed out of Africa starting much earlier, and reaching much further, than previously thought,” the study authors write.

But not all experts are convinced. Melanie Lee Chang, an evolutionary biologist at Portland State University, tells Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post that Apidima 1 is an “outlier,” and that she is “not willing to sign on to all of [the researchers’] conclusions here.” And Juan Luis Arsuaga, a paleoanthropologist from the University of Madrid, tells National Goegraphic’s Wei-Haas that he is “astonished” by the team’s interpretation of the fossils. Arsuaga was part of a 2017 study that dated Apidima 2 to approximately 160,000 years ago.

“I cannot see anything suggesting that [Apidima 1] belongs to the sapiens lineage,” he says.

Even Chris Stringer, a co-author of the study and paleoanthropologist at London’s Natural History Museum, acknowledges in an email to Achenbach that the paper represents “challenging new find.”

“We don’t have the frontal bone, browridge, face, teeth or chin region, any of which could have been less ‘modern’ in form,” Stringer says, though he notes that Apidima 1 “certainly shows the high and rounded back to the skull that is typical only of H. sapiens.”

DNA analysis would certainly lend some clarity to this debate, but it isn’t always possible to extract DNA from ancient, decaying specimens. According to Delson, palaeoproteomics, or the analysis of ancient proteins preserved in fossils, might be the next best option; this technique was recently used to identify a fossil from a Siberian cave as belonging to a Denisovan.

“Proteins are composed of a sequence of amino acids, and this sequence is coded for in the genome,” Frido Welker, the author of that study explained at the time. “[A]ncient proteins survive longer than DNA, making them a suitable molecular alternative for evolutionary analyses in cases where ancient DNA does not survive.”

But for now, Delson maintains, studies like the one by Harvati and her team “provide our best handle on the complex history of our species and our close relatives as these populations dispersed out of Africa—from the early, unsuccessful dispersals to the migrations that eventually succeeded.”
Paleoanthropologists announce, through the Nature journal, that a human skull (Apidima 1) discovered inside a cave in Greece, is dated to 210,000 years ago, making it the oldest known Homo sapiens individual found outside of Africa.