Anthropologists exploring a cave in Israel have uncovered a rare 55,000-year-old fossil skull that they say has a story to tell of a reverberating transition in human evolution, in the time and place when some early humans were moving out of Africa and apparently interbreeding with Neanderthals.
The story is of when the Levant was a corridor for anatomically modern humans who were expanding out of Africa and then across Eurasia, replacing all other forms of early human-related species. Given the scarcity of human fossils from that time, scholars say, these ancestors of present-day non-African populations had remained largely enigmatic.
From the new fossil find, which could be closely related to the first modern humans to colonize Stone Age Europe, it appears that these people already had physical traits a bit different from the Africans they were leaving behind and many other human inhabitants along the corridor.
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Excavations at Manot Cave are expected to continue through at least 2020, searching deeper for more fossils and artifacts from the migrating people. Israel, Dr. Hershkovitz said, “is like a Swiss cheese, lots of caves everywhere.”
Several caves in the vicinity of Manot were occupied for long times by Neanderthals between 65,000 and 50,000 years ago. In this respect, Dr. Hershkovitz said, Manot is an excellent place to search for possible hybrids, but they may be difficult to recognize from surface features. “Only DNA study will solve the problem,” he said.
