Remains of a new type of early humans dug up in Israel, rewriting our evolutionary history
JERUSALEM: Bones belonging to a “new type of early human” previously unknown to science have been found in Israel, researchers said on Thursday, claiming to have shed new light on human evolution.
Excavations in the quarry of a cement plant near the central city of Ramla uncovered prehistoric remains that could not be matched to any known species from the Homo genus.
Researchers from Tel Aviv University and Hebrew University of Jerusalem dubbed the “extraordinary discovery” the “Nesher Ramla Homo type” after the site, in a study that was published in the journal Science.
The fossils date back to between 140,000 and 120,000 years ago, and the team believes the Nesher Ramla type would have overlapped with
Homo sapiens, the lineage of modern humans.
“We had never imagined that alongside Homo sapiens, archaic Homo roamed the area so late in human history,” lead archaeologist Yossi Zaidner said.
Along with the human remains, the dig also uncovered large quantities of animal bones as well as stone tools.
“The archaeological finds associated with human fossils show that ‘Nesher Ramla Homo’ possessed advanced stone-tool production technologies and most likely interacted with the local Homo sapiens,” Zaidner said.
The researchers suggested that some fossils previously discovered in Israel dating back as far as 400,000 years could belong to the same prehistoric human type.
Dentist and anthropologist Rachel Sarig of Tel Aviv University said that previously researchers had tried to ascribe the older bones to known human groups like Homo sapiens or Neanderthals.
“But now we say - no. This is a group in itself, with distinct features and characteristics,” she said.
The Israeli researchers make the controversial claim that the discovery of a new archaic Homo group in West Asia challenges accepted ideas that Neanderthals originated in Europe.
“Before these new findings, most researchers believed the Neanderthals to be a European story, in which small groups of Neanderthals were forced to migrate southwards to escape the spreading glaciers,” Tel Aviv University’s professor Israel Hershkovitz said.
Sarig said small groups of the Nesher Ramla type likely migrated into Europe, later evolving into Neanderthals, and Asia, developing into populations with similar features.
The researchers say this might also explain how some Homo sapiens genes have been found in the Neanderthal population that had presumably lived in Europe long before the former’s arrival.
Geneticists who are closely studying the DNA of European Neanderthals have previously suggested the existence of a Neanderthal-like population, dubbed the “missing population” or the “X population”, which would have interbred with Homo sapiens more than 200,000 years ago.
In the paper, the Israeli researchers suggest that the Nesher Ramla Homo type might be that missing link.
Sarig said the find suggested that “as a crossroads between Africa, Europe and Asia, the land of Israel served as a melting pot where different human populations mixed with one another to later spread throughout the Old World”.