Does the history of our species change?A skull found in a cliffside cave on the southern coast of Greece in 1978represents the oldest Homo sapiens fossil outside of Africa,scientists say.
That skull, from an individual who lived at least 210,000 years ago, was encased in a rock that also had a Neanderthal skull from at least 170,000 years ago, according to a team of experts led by paleoanthropologist Katerina Harvati of the University of Tübingen ( Germany).
If these findings, collected in the journalNature,argue, this ancient Greek skull of H. sapienswould be more than 160,000 years older than the next oldest European H. sapien fossilss, thus rewriting the history of our species as it would suggest that the ‘sapiens’ migrated to Europe much earlier than previously believed and were replaced by the Neanderthals. And it is also older than the jaw of H. sapiens from Israel’s Misliya cave, which dates from approximately 177,000 to 194,000 years ago.
“Multiple populations of Homo sapiens spread out of Africa starting much earlier, and reaching much further into Europe, than previously thought,” Harvati told a news conference. [African Homo sapiens emerged approximately 300,000 years ago].
A small group of humans may have arrived in what is now Greece more than 200,000 years ago, the expert suggests. Neanderthals who settled in southeastern Europe soon after may have replaced the first Homo sapiens. Then the humans who arrived in Mediterranean Europe, tens of thousands of years later, would have replaced the resident Neanderthals,who died about 40,000 years ago.
But this team of researchers cannot exclude the possibility that H. sapiens and Neanderthals 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 Neanderthals at that time.
In Greece
The two skulls were held up in a small wall section in the Apidima cave in Greece from the sediment of the highest cliff and then solidified approximately 150,000 years ago. According to the researchers, as one skull is older than the other, each must have originally been deposited in different layers of sediment before ending up at a distance of about 30 centimeters on the cave wall.
In order tocompare the sizes and shapes of the two ancient Greek skulls,The researchers overlaid a digital reconstruction of a Neanderthal’s face and partial brain base (with its recovered pieces displayed in different colors) on the back of a Homo sapiens brain base (in yellow). The results support the argument that the skulls do not come from the same species, the researchers say.
Previous studies indicated thata skull of Apidima, which preserves the face and much of the brain, was a Neanderthal that lived at least 160,000 years agos. But fossilization and sediment pressures had distorted the shape of the skull. Based on four 3-D digital reconstructions of the specimen, Harvati’s team concluded that its heavy eyebrows, sloping face, and other features looked more like Neanderthal skulls than ancient and modern human skulls. An analysis of the rate of decay of radioactive forms of uranium in skull bone fragments produced an age estimate of at least 170,000 years.
A second Apidima fossil, also dated by uranium analysis, is on the back of a slightly distorted brain base. Its rounded shape in a digital reconstruction characterizes H. sapiens, not Neanderthals, according to experts.
But without facial remains to confirm the species identity of the partial brain base, “it is still possible that both Apidima skulls are Neanderthals,” says paleoanthropologist Israel Hershkovitz of Tel Aviv University. Hershkovitz who led the team that discovered Misliya’s jaw and assigned it to homo sapiens.
What will happen now?
Scientists will try to extract the DNA and proteins that distinguish species from Greek skulls to determine their evolutionary identities and look for signs of interbreeding between humans and Neanderthals.
If consistent, this finding would describe that it did not take us long to leave the mother continent and we went quite far, jumping to Europe 150,000 years earlier than previously believed; doing it several times until we get to spread throughout the planet.
Referencia: K. Harvati et al. Apidima Cave fossils provide earliest evidence of Homo sapiens in Eurasia. Nature. Published online July 10, 2019. doi:10.1038/s41586-019-1376-z. E. Delson. An early modern human outside Africa. Nature. Published online July 10, 2019. doi:10.1038/d41586-019-02075-9.
Crédito imagen: K. Harvati et al/Nature 2019
