Mideast skull find sheds light on spread of humans

A 55,000-year-old partial skull found in a cave in Galilee, Israel, gives clues to when our ancestors left their African homeland, and strengthens theories that they co-habited with Neanderthals

ANCIENT SKULL. Israeli Professor Hershkowitz shows part of a 55,000 year old partial skull found in the Dan David-Manot Cave in Israel's Western Galilee, near the settlement of Manot, on January 28, 2015. Menahem Kahana/AFP

PARIS, France A 55,000-year-old partial skull found in the Middle East gives clues to when our ancestors left their African homeland, and strengthens theories that they co-habited with Neanderthals, scientists said Wednesday, January 28.

Found in Manot Cave in western Galilee, north Israel, the cranium has the characteristics of an early Homo sapiens, as anatomically modern humans are called, they said.

Manot is just a few dozen kilometers (miles) to the north and northwest of two other sites the Kebara and Amud caves where Neanderthal remains had been found.

Those relics were dated to between 50,000 and 65,000 years of age: in other words, humans from two species may have been contemporaries possibly even neighbors.

"It has been suspected that modern man and Neanderthals were in the same place at the same time, but we didn't have the physical evidence," said Bruce Latimer, a paleontologist at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio.

"Now we do have it, in the new fossil," he added.

Neanderthals are an enigmatic branch of the human tree, whose fossils and bone tools have been found in Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia.

Their record peters out about 30,000 years ago a strange ending that has triggered speculation that they were either wiped out by H. sapiens, the new and smarter hominid on the block, or that they disappeared because they interbred with us.

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Mideast skull find sheds light on spread of humans