Ancient fossil sheds light on explorers
ISRAEL: An ancient jawbone uncovered from a collapsed cave on the coast of Israel is at least 175,000 years old, and it belonged to a member of our own species.
The find, reported yesterday in the journal is by far the oldest human fossil uncovered outside Africa, where Homo sapiens originated. It pushes back the timeline of when modern humans began venturing to other continents by about 60,000 years and suggests that people made several shortlived excursions into Eurasia millennia before we finally conquered the globe.
The owner of the jawbone was probably one of those early unsuccessful explorers – a tangent in the story of humanity, said Rick Potts, director of the Human Origins Programme at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History.
Potts, who was not involved in the dis- covery, compared the Israeli fossil with the remains of failed colonisation attempts like the Viking settlements in Newfoundland or Jamestown in Virginia.
‘‘It’s inherently fascinating and interesting. Not only throughout history but deep into our prehistory, there have been these pioneers ... that were not able to survive.’’
The jawbone, with eight teeth still embedded, was excavated from Misliya Cave on the slopes of Israel’s Mt Carmel. Today the site is little more than a jumble of rubble shadowed by a rock overhang. Yet from about 250,000 to 150,000 years ago, before it collapsed, the cavern was vast.
From this high perch above the sea, the resources of the Mediterranean, the coastal plain and the forested mountain range were within easy reach. According to University of Haifa archaeologist Mina Weinstein-Evron, a co-author of the
study, this was a perfect shelter for ancient hominins – the group that includes humans and extinct relatives.
Weinstein-Evron has worked at the Misliya site for nearly two decades, uncovering scores of discarded tools, animal bones, even evidence of fire – discoveries that span the 100,000 years in which the cave was in use. The jawbone is the only remnant of any hominin species found so far.
‘‘It was very exciting,’’ she recalled. ‘‘A full jaw with all the teeth ... is not something you find very often.’’
A single jawbone cannot reveal everything about an individual – for example, Weinstein-Evron does not know if this fossil belonged to a man or a woman – but it can tell a lot. After all, you are what you eat; much information about a species is encoded in its mouth.
At first glance, this bone looked like it came from the mouth of a modern human. The fossil lacks the pronounced shovel-shaped canines of a Neanderthal, and it has the straight-edged incisors characteristic of our species. The shape of its jaw also resembles our own.
Weinstein-Evron and her colleagues were meticulous. They spent more than a decade analysing the remains, and sought to determine their age using three distinct dating methods. Collectively, the results indicate the fossil is somewhere between 177,000 and 194,000 years old.
The jawbone’s owner may have been ancient, but he or she was no simpleton. Uncovered alongside the fossil were stone points made using an advanced form of stone knapping called the Levallois technique. This method of tool production involves carefully cutting a stone around the outline of a desired shape, so that when the final blow is struck, a perfect point emerges.
‘‘It’s very sophisticated, because it shows abstract thinking,’’ WeinsteinEvron said. ‘‘You have to plan ahead what you want to get from a certain core.’’ –