Oldest Skull Found Outside Africa
(National Geographic) Along the rugged coastline of southern Greece, our ancient human relatives may have sojourned in what was once a balmy refuge from the encroaching glaciers of the mid-Pleistocene. While most vanished without a trace, skulls from two individuals were somehow swept into a deep crack in the ground, where the bones became cemented in a jumble of earth.
Hundreds of thousands of years later, analyses of these remains hint at an unexpected identity: One skull fragment may have belonged to an early modern human that lived at least 210,000 years ago, making it the oldest human fossil yet found outside of Africa.
“It is very exciting!” lead study author Katerina Harvati, of Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, says via email. “It is gratifying to see that my hypotheses about the importance of the region for human evolution are supported by our findings.” (Find out more about the identities of the first Europeans.)
These fragmented fossils, which were found mere inches apart, could be the skulls from two hominin species separated by tens of thousands of years—a 170,000-year-old Neanderthal (left) and a 210,000-year-old early modern human.
If confirmed, the discovery would help clarify the earliest movements of our species as anatomically modern humans spread out of Africa. But not everyone is convinced by the strength of this new evidence.
“I cannot see anything suggesting that the individual belongs to the sapiens lineage,” says Juan Luis Arsuaga, a paleoanthropologist from the University of Madrid. He and his colleagues’ 2017 analysis of a skull found nearby concluded that the remains were all likely Neanderthal origin, dating to at least 160,000 years ago.
“I was completely astonished,” he says of the team’s provocative conclusions.
New techniques for old finds
Discovered in the late 1970s, the skull fragments peeked out from a wall of Apidima Cave, a site outside the Peloponnesian town of Areopoli. But studying the Apidima fossils, as they came to be called, has involved many challenges. For one, the fragmented skulls were encased in their rocky matrix until the late 1990s and early 2000s. Even once removed from the rock, their identities weren’t initially obvious.
One skull was nearly complete, but it had been distorted during the millennia spent in its rocky casing. Still, past work identified the skull as a Neanderthal, a conclusion shared by the latest study. The second skull fragment was mere inches away in the rock and was small—a single piece just larger than the size of an adult palm—so previous researchers concluded that it was likely the same species and age as the first.
As part of ongoing analyses of these enigmatic fossils, scientists at the University of Athen’s Museum of Anthropology reached out to Harvati to inquire if she was interested in studying them. Eager to apply modern techniques to these well-known remains, she and her colleagues jumped at the opportunity.
“It’s a fantastic coincidence that you have two skulls together 30 centimeters apart,” marvels study author Rainer Grün of Griffith University in Australia. “In all of Greece, you have one more skull—that’s it—in that timeframe. So it’s a wonder of nature that you find the two together.”
Harvati and her team CT-scanned the fossils, and then two of the team members separately worked on virtual reconstructions, each using two different protocols in an attempt to reduce bias while digitally tweaking the fossils. Finally, the scientists compared the features of the reconstructions to a variety of skulls known to be either Homo sapiens or Neanderthal, as well as other Eurasian and African skulls of debated species that are dated to the Middle Pleistocene.
Try, try again
The resulting identity of the small skull fragment was the team’s first big surprise: It was remarkably similar to skulls of modern humans.
While a skull fragment might seem like a scanty piece of evidence for such a big conclusion, the back of the head holds a number of clues that can point to H. sapiens. It’s nearly as diagnostic as the chin—a trait unique to H. sapiens among the hominins, says paleoanthropologist Eric Delson of the City University of New York, who was not part of the research team but who wrote a Nature News and Views article accompanying the study.
For one, there’s the shape. If you put your hand to the back of your head, you should be able to feel it curve like a grapefruit. But Neanderthal heads are more elongated, with a protrusion known as a chignon, which is French for “bun.” The ancient skull fragment from Apidima lacks this elongation.
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