Thread by @katewong

[THREAD] This re-analysis of two partial fossil skulls from Apidima Cave in Greece is super interesting! One looks to be a Neandertal from ~170,000 years ago nature.com/articles/s4158… [Image: Katerina Harvati, Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen]

The other is purportedly early Homo sapiens, dated to at least 210,000 years ago. This latter fossil, called Apidima 1, could really shake up our understanding of this interval in human prehistory. [Image: Katerina Harvati, Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen]

Not so long ago the leading theory of modern human origins held that our species arose around 200,000 years ago in Africa and did not begin dispersing around 60,000 years ago, apart from forays into nearby Israel around 90,000 to 120,000 years ago.

But recent discoveries have begun to reveal a different picture. Fossils from Morocco have pushed back the origin of H. sapiens to at least 315,000 years ago scientificamerican.com/article/ancien…

A jawbone from Israel shows that our species was venturing out of Africa (even if only a little ways out) by 194,000 – 177,000 years ago scientificamerican.com/article/contro…

A finger bone from Saudi Arabia documents the presence of H. sapiens there 85,000 years ago. Other finds hint that our species reached China by perhaps 120,000 years ago, Indonesia as early as 73,000 years ago and Australia by 65,000 years ago.

No such early H. sapiens discoveries had been made in Europe, however. It seemed like Europe was the domain of the Neandertals and that modern humans didn’t get there until after 50,000 years ago.

If the Apidima 1 fossil truly is H. sapiens, that would make it the oldest known representative of our species found outside of Africa, and it would push back our kind’s arrival in Europe by a whole lot—at least 160,000 years.

This shift in the timing of H. sapiens dispersal has interesting implications. For one, it means that our species may have had more opportunities to run into archaic human groups outside Africa such as the Neandertals—encounters that could've led to cultural & genetic exchange.

I also wonder whether it could raise questions about who made the artifacts and “art” at some sites in Europe that lack human fossils.

For example, deep inside a cave in France, rings of intentionally placed stalagmites—perhaps for ceremonial use—have been attributed to Neandertals because they date to 176,000 years ago, long before H. sapiens was thought to have set foot on the continent scientificamerican.com/article/neande…

Similarly, some cave paintings in Spain have been argued to be Neandertal art because they date to around 65,000 years ago—some 20,000 years before H. sapiens reached Europe, according to conventional wisdom scientificamerican.com/article/ancien…

Of course, just because H. sapiens was in Greece 210,000 years ago does not necessarily mean it was elsewhere in Eurasia at that time or that it maintained a continuous presence there.

In fact mounting evidence suggests that our species underwent multiple dispersals out of Africa before 60,000 years ago but that many of these dispersing groups went extinct.

At Apidima, those early H. sapiens appear to have been replaced by Neandertals. Only tens of thousands of years later did another group of H. sapiens replace our archaic cousins.

There's a lesson in humility here. Apidima offers a striking example of how our species was not destined for world domination from the outset. We just got lucky somewhere along the way. scientificamerican.com/article/why-is…

For more on Apidima:

nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/0… by @WeiPoints

sciencemag.org/news/2019/07/s… by @lizzie_wade

theatlantic.com/science/archiv… by @edyong209

nature.com/articles/d4158… by Eric Delson

https://twitter.com/ChrisStringer65/status/1149001290795687939

by @ChrisStringer65

https://twitter.com/Katerina__Douka/status/1149335677521317888

by @Katerina__Douka