Israel, a crossroads for human evolution
Archaeologists find that the Holy Land’s 1.5 million-year-long human presence still has secrets to reveal
Last month new Israeli research made waves around the world offering evidence testifying to the existence of a previously unknown ancient human type. The “Nesher Ramla Homo,” as the experts dubbed it, naming the group after the site where the fossilized bones of one individual were uncovered, is thought to have lived in the area around 130,000 years ago, with its ancestors wandering around the land as early as 400,000 years ago.
This discovery represents just the latest contribution that archaeological expeditions and research carried out in Israel have offered to the field of human evolution.
As scholars explained to The Jerusalem Post, the region’s location as a land bridge between Africa, Europe and Asia, as well as the extensive archaeological work that has been carried out for the last century, places the country at a crossroads of the development of humankind. And while much has already been unearthed, many more secrets are yet to be revealed.
“All hominids had to pass through Israel to go from Africa on one side and Asia and Europe on the other side,” Prof. Israel Hershkovitz, head of Dan David Laboratory for the Search and Study of Modern Humans at Tel Aviv University, said. “We are talking about quite a narrow bridge, only a few dozens of kilometers wide. This is the reason why Israel is one of the richest countries in the world in terms of prehistoric sites.”
Hershkovitz was one of the leading researchers in the Nesher Ramla Homo study.
According to TAU Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology Ran Barkai, it is also important to consider that, contrary to what has happened in other regions, Israel has been extensively excavated, with the first digs in prehistoric sites starting as early as 100 years ago.
“We have a combination of human presence in the past and modern research in the present,” he said. “Other countries might be very rich in archaeological sites, but there is no comparison in terms of depth of research.”
In 1925, an expedition of British and French archaeologists started excavating in the Galilee and quickly realized that they were standing on a prominent prehistoric site. Since then, the work has flourished and dozens of new sites have been identified all over the country, from the Carmel to the Negev.
The earliest evidence of human presence found in Israel dates back to 1.5 million years ago.
“Israel has been continuously inhabited since that time by all sorts of ancient humans,” Hershkovitz said. “If someone wants to understand human evolution, they have to study the fossils of Israel, because they tell us a lot not just about the local population in prehistoric times, but about other populations around the world.”
EXPERTS BELIEVE that the first humans who left Africa were Homo erectus. Homo erectus is thought to be the first human population that could walk upright and control fire. They probably lived in Israel for about a million years.
“From 500,000 years ago, we see many different specimens in the area which are attributed to different homo types, depending on different interpretations,” Hershkovitz noted. “I think that the fossils from 400,000 years ago belonged to the Nesher Ramla Homo. Modern humans started to arrive in Israel around 200,000 years ago.”
For tens of thousands of years, modern humans – or Homo sapiens, the human type of all current inhabitants of the planet – lived side by side with the Nesher Ramla groups, and they likely intermarried.
Around 90,000 year ago, both species appeared to go extinct, Hershkovitz remarked.
“Between 70,000 and 50,000 years ago, in Israel we find only fossils of Neanderthals,” he said.
Up until the discovery of the Nesher Ramla Homo, the general consensus was that Neanderthals came from Europe.
“The classic view was that the Neanderthal population originated in Europe some 300,000 years ago,” Dr. Omri Barzilai, head of the archaeological research department at the Israel Antiquities Authority and an expert in prehistory, said. “At some point, they started migrating south, making it here to the Near East, but also to the eastern parts of Asia.”
These movements were likely caused by severe climate conditions.
“During the peak of the ice age, living in Europe was impossible, so they were pushed south,” Barzilai added.
Recently, the archaeologist coauthored a study that showed how Neanderthals and Homo sapiens coexisted in the Negev desert some 50,000 years ago, based on the findings at the site of Boker Tachtit.
The site has traditionally been considered a key to understanding the transition from a Neanderthal prehistorical culture to the beginning of modern humans’ reign. Based on the new research, the development took place over some 5,000 years, a relatively brief period.
This population of Homo sapiens represented a new wave of humans leaving Africa.
“They are the group that established the modern human population in Israel,” Hershkovitz said.
Around the same time, the Neanderthals appear to have gone extinct.
“I believe that they were already on the verge of extinction, and when Sapiens arrived, equipped with better tools and technology, living in larger groups, they wiped them out,” Hershkovitz said.
The discovery of the Nesher Ramla Homo has added another potential layer to the role of Israel in human evolution. The authors of the study believe that this group might have migrated north and originated the Neanderthals themselves, as well as other human types who developed in Asia.
Tens of thousands of years later, some Neanderthal migrated back south.
IN ORDER to understand more about ancient human migration waves, as well as how the different groups are interconnected, the hope for the future is to manage to extract some DNA from the fossils.
Currently, no DNA older than 15,000 years ago has ever been retrieved in Israel. The region’s weather is especially deteriorating for it.
“However, there are many new
technologies, and we keep on trying,” Hershkovitz said.
In addition, the experts are hoping to find new human fossils.
As Barkai noted, human bones represent only a minuscule part of the findings at prehistoric sites, which are mainly represented by stone tools and animal bones.
“Some 99.9% of all our findings for this 1.5 million years of history are tools, stone waste material and animal bones. Human bones and other kinds of items, such as symbolic items, are extremely rare, only found occasionally,” he said.
The reason for such a scarcity remains a mystery.
“If animal bones are preserved to the point that we find millions of them in a site, also human bones should be preserved,” Barkai noted.
According to the archaeologist, a possible explanation is that the areas where ancient humans lived, worked on their tools, or butchered and ate the animals they hunted, were not the same as where they went to die.
“We might be looking in the wrong places,” he said.
Barkai noted that this is true for most of prehistoric sites in the world, though there have been instances of sites presenting a lot of human remains, one in Spain and one in South Africa.
“We are talking about caves full of human remains, not sites that were inhabited,” Barkai noted.
However, only a limited part of what we know about human evolution is based on human remains.
The technologies and tools ancient humans developed – many of which can be found in Israel – also shed light on the journey of humanity toward what we are today.
“Archaeologists can divide these tools into different cultures because they present very specific characteristics,” Barzilai said.
“The most ancient tool we found is called flake,” Barkai noted. “They were pieces of flint detached from a big chunk of stone. They were simple but efficient and existed throughout human evolution, as other sets of tools started to accompany them.”
“The tools were prevalently used to butcher animals,” he added. “Each tool
was designed for a specific function, but at the same time ancient humans changed their tool kits through time, and we do not always know why this happened, but we do know that there were sequences of technological changes, and that tools took different shapes in different times according to the functional and cultural concepts of each period.”
Sometimes, these periods could last hundreds of thousands of years, without any significant change taking place.
Some techniques became strongly associated with a particular group.
For example, a technique known as Levallois is generally associated with the Neanderthals. It was characterized by the production of large flakes flat on one side and with sharp cutting edges using a core prepared in the shape of an inverted tortoise shell.
On the other hand, Homo sapiens employed the blade technology.
“They manufactured long blades, about 5 cm. to 8 cm. long, and out of
these blades they produced their weapons and other artifacts,” Barzilai noted.
OVER THE course of 1.5 million years in Israel, fauna also changed.
“All the animals that we find now also existed in the past, but there were many more species, which eventually became extinct,” Barkai said. “There were elephants, rhinos, hippopotamuses, leopards, lions, bears and more.”
According to the researcher, humans played a crucial role in driving these animals to extinction over the millennia. As a consequence, their habits also changed.
“There was a constant decrease in the size of animals that humans hunted and consumed throughout time,” said Barkai, who has been researching the relationship between ancient humans and elephants for years. “Large animals disappeared, and at the eve of the agricultural revolution, humans were hunting very small animals.
“If, 1.5 million years ago, humans hunted animals of an average weight of 500 kilos, 10,000 years ago the average weight was 50 kilos,” he added.
This also meant that a community needed to hunt more animals in order to feed itself.
On the other hand, Barkai does not think that the change in climate had a significant impact on the change in the fauna.
“The changes here were not as severe as in other parts of the world,” he said. “Basically, this was always a good place to live.”
A century after researchers started to dig in the region’s prehistory, excavations throughout Israel do not stop and new technologies allow scholars to extract more and more information from their findings.
As new prehistoric mysteries are slowly cracked, Israel continues to prove to be a fundamental crossroad for humankind and a crucial area for us to understand more about how our earliest ancestors lived, loved and explored the world.