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muriel_volestrangler

(101,154 posts)
Thu Jan 25, 2018, 04:22 PM Jan 2018

Modern humans left Africa much earlier

New dating of fossils from Israel indicates that our species (Homo sapiens) lived outside Africa around 185,000 years ago, some 80,000 years earlier than the previous evidence.
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The researchers analysed a fragment of a jawbone with eight teeth, found in Misliya cave in 2002. The jawbone looked as if it was from a modern human rather than from one of the other species of human that existed at the time.
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The Misliya remains were found in a layer containing stone tools that belong to the Levallois type, which was used in the region between 250,000 and 140,000 years ago. If Levallois tools are associated with the spread of modern humans into the area, it suggests that our species may have journeyed beyond Africa even earlier than the dates for the Misliya material.
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Last year, researchers published evidence from German Neanderthal remains of mixing that occurred between 219,000 and 460,000 years ago. And in 2016, a team found signs that pioneer groups from Africa interbred with Neanderthals in the Altai region of Siberia about 100,000 years ago.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-42817323
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