158 — The earliest modern humans outside Africa

Dammit.

I just finished reading Sapiens, and now everything’s going to be all out of date and wrong again.

This paper details the recent discovery of a maxilla from a human skeleton at Misliya Cave in Israel. Previous to this discovery, the oldest records of modern humans outside of Africa were dated around 100,000 years ago. This new discovery sets that date back by nearly 100,000 additional years.

The fossil dating was performed both on the maxilla and tooth enamel itself, as well as on burnt flints in the vicinity of the fossil. Three different laboratories confirmed the validity of the dates determined.

This is a particularly fun fossil to find because the maxilla is so highly involved in shaping the face. Though this specimen isn’t more useful for performing scientific analyses than any other fragment of bone, it’s interesting to experiment with facial reconstructions from this specimen. From these patterns and reconstructions, the researchers were able to verify that the skull likely looked quite similar to modern humans’.

The teeth are slightly larger than those of a modern human, but the shape is very similar (which distinguishes this individual from Neanderthal teeth found elsewhere). A very cool figure on the last page embeds the primary components of the tooth crown shape in 2D, and shows that the teeth in the fossil maxilla are well inside the modern humans cluster and are far away from others.

This is a really cool find and I expect it to change the way we understand the spread of modern humans from Africa. Shifting this exodus back by 50,000 years may change our understanding of early anthropology dramatically.