I have read that even though there is that early sapien imprint on the Neanderthal genome, two populations of Denisovans have been sequenced and neither has signs of sapien interbreeding. One sample as recent as 35,000 years, the original find of the species, was unadulterated. But their genes are present today. What story does that tell of human migration? A sudden onslaught of modern man into East Asia at the end of the ice age?
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It seems clear that there were several waves of migration out of Africa into Europe and the Near East, with the earlier migrants either killed by the hominins already there or dying out for some other reason. To me, however, the most interesting part of the story of human evolution is the genetic change that must have occurred to create human culture. Anatomically modern humans are not behaviorally modern humans. They existed for hundreds of thousands of years without doing anything different from what Neanderthals were doing. And then suddenly the massive expansion out of Africa, evidence of language, art, cultural innovation and tribal cooperation. What was happening in Africa during the interval between the earlier and later migrations, either genetically or culturally or both?
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While some continue to argue that this find supports yet another failed migration out of Africa, the reality is that it only confirms the presence of a Homo sapiens population in Eurasia over 200,000 years ago - no need or reason to imagine an associated out of Africa migration.
The problem is that almost no news stories mentioned that we already have archaic Homo sapiens fossils from the same period as those in Jebel Irhoud, the Levant and Greece far away in China at Dali, Jinniushan, Hualongdong, Maba & Chaoxian. We also have modern human fossils in China dated at 80,000 to 120,000 years and additional archaeology that places members of this Asiatic population in Australia and the Indonesian Islands at a time contemporary to those in China.
At what point do we say that enough is enough and that we need to rethink the entire model?
There is now no reason at all to invoke a recent Out of Africa migration to explain the populating of Eurasia and I am struggling to find data that still supports that hypothesis.
Overwhelmingly, the latest evidence points to a longstanding Eurasian Homo sapiens population from at least 300,000 years ago until 70,000 years ago, which then collapsed during the extreme climate event in the Northern Hemisphere at that time (exacerbated by the eruption of the Lake Toba super-volcano 73,000yrs BP).
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Why couldn't humans have evolved in far flung geographically separate areas simultaneously; like Neanderthals, denisovans, erectis, sapians, etc? Here, there and elsewhere. Do Neanderthals and denisovans also have out-of Africa dna?
"...a new study of their age..."derived from analysis of "...tiny samples of rock retrieved from the two fossils."
Any chance old rock became attached to much younger bones?
@Randy Kessler
You mean you imagine that scientists wouldn't know the difference between a rock and a human bone?
If that were be the case, how would studying fossils even be possible ... ?
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This new finding of a very old Homo Sapiens skull reminds me of Yorick’s skull that belonged to Hamlet’s playmate. Yorick was buried & forgotten in the past when Hamlet came upon his grave.
The 250,000 human skull was buried & forgotten when Anthropologists came upon it in the Greek cave. This dramatic archaeological finding seems a lot like a Shakespearean drama.
Our ancestors the Homo Sapiens were versatile actors who played many roles while adapting to their environment, therefore their lives are very exciting & theatrical!
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Wow, what an exciting discovery, thanks NYT!
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How would the fossil record be expected to look if the earliest migration was more transitory and less settled than the current understanding?
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@Gen It all depends on first doing a lot of digging for fossils. In the Near East, for example, it's pretty clear that Homo sapiens was there before 100,000 years ago--but then disappeared. It's not that the fossil sites don't exist--it's just that researchers find Neanderthals or mammals at those sites, and no Homo sapiens--until much later when they come back into the fossil record. In Europe, researchers now have one skull of H. sapiens at 210,000 years, 160,000 years before the next evidence of our species on that continent. If they can fill in the fossil record more, especially in southeast Europe, they can see if this initial migration really did disappear as evidence right now would suggest. It would be AMAZING if researchers could look at DNA from the Apidima fossils. If the "early dead end" hypothesis is right, you'd expect Apidima 1's DNA to show that this person's ancestry reflects an earlier migration from Africa than the ancestors of living Europeans. But Dr. Harvarti was pretty pessimistic about the odds of any DNA surviving. We shall see!
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What an interesting & fascinating column but best of all is the dialogue between the columnist & the readers. I know this is not possible in all cases but when it is, it’s interactive magic!!
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Carl Zimmer, could you please talk with your Editors and especially with those who are responsible for the Comment System.
I am writing from Sweden where I have lived for 22 years and would, of course, read the Times OnLine every day even if there were no comment system. But since there is a comment system, the best I have ever seen, then I devote at least one hour every day to reading and writing comments.
If I see your name, then that will be one of the first articles I will read. Your reports on what science can accomplish are especially important in this era when the government of the USA rejects science and when that same government is led by a man who believes not only that he is genetically superior to most Americans but who supports fully groups that believe in the racial order created by those who invented the "races" used in American discussion.
Two especially good things here today.
The link to a 2016 article I had missed.
Your replies to comment writers.
I would like it if you could tell your Editors that we readers would like very much for columnists to do what you do today, reply to a subset of comments, perhaps once a week at best but otherwise once a month.
David Reich did that after we comment writers questioned his column in which he still wanted us to see the "races" in an essentialist way. He withdraw that view in in a column to readers.
Only-NeverInSweden.blogspot.com
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@Larry Lundgren I'll be happy to draw the attention of my editors to your comment. But I should add that they've already been making this kind of interaction a high priority (a decision I certainly am in favor of, as an inveterate blogger!)
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@Carl Zimmer Thanks. It would be even better if the Editors gave comment writers a forum where the Editors informed us about the comment system, gave us data on daily input and filtering and much more.
Recently the comment system has not been functioning as well as it used to: we get messages telling us comments may not be viewed thus making it impossible to carry on an in-house discussion.
One more thing for the Editors. There should be many more comments than 27 at an article of this importance. Not sure if it is not being seen, perhaps because it appears under Matter.
No further reply needed. Thanks very much.
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@Larry Lundgren
Larry Lundgren of Sweden. I would like to associate with your comment. Carl Zimmer performs a great service in providing readers with a much richer experience by reading the comments to articles posted by NYTimes journalists and columnists. For me, comments contribute immensely to provoking deeper thought than I would experience without the comments and to see Carl Zimmer's thoughts in his response doubles interest.
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The logic and reasoning paths that form the basis of this line of thought are fundamentally flawed. Following the path of Neanderthals is a distraction and since no one disputes it everyone accepts it. What if Neanderthals and those connected to them were outliers -outside of many a developed civilization? What if an entirely different timeline in 'human' development going back hundreds of thousands of years actually was the fact?
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@J Martin If we have hypotheses about human evolution, we can look to the evidence on hand to see how well it is supported in comparison to alternative hypotheses. And scientists can then look for more evidence to test it. In addition to fossils, we can now look at the DNA of living humans and the DNA from fossils of Neanderthals and Denisovans. (Maybe soon we'll be able to look at other groups of hominins.) Neanderthals form a distinct group, whose ancestors split from our own about 600,000 years ago. Before they became extinct, they interbred with modern humans, and so billions of people inherit fragments of their DNA. The combined evidence thus points now to Homo sapiens evolving in Africa and then expanding at least once early on, and then expanding more permanently about 70,000 years ago, after which our species interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans. The only way to judge "an entirely different timeline" would be to look at the totality of evidence and argue that the timeline explains the evidence better than what I just sketched out.
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What a joy , Dr Zimmer to read your exciting article about human history a quarter million years ago in that cradle of recent civilization, Greece. And as a desert the discussion you engaged in with your readers was quit personal, as if we were in a small seminar. The team work of various anthropologists made this come together. All the news that’s fit to print. Thank you!
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@Markham Kirsten, MD Thanks! Just one correction: I'm Mr. Zimmer, not Dr. Or just Carl.
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consider it honorary. it is a wonderful interaction as I feel my balding spot.
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Mr Zimmer, thank you for this fascinating and enlightening article. And for your informed answers to readers' questions. The dates are staggering. Well done!
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@Patricia H It's my pleasure to be able to expand a bit on what's in the story. There's always more to tell!
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Carl, I always read Your wonderful science articles in the times. Thank You for the interesting and exciting reading promoting science and learning especially in the current environment of Trump and Republican non-science believers. Is this really 2019? Next we will burning at the stake. Did Darwin ever write anything on de-evolution ? I should contact the White House and the RNC to find out. Ha Ha. But my sincere thanks.
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A fascinating but mysterious article..but that two fossils wind up in proximity to each other and yet are supposed to be 40,000 years apart stretches credibility...notwithstanding the theory that two individuals fell into the same hole 40,00 years apart,
rather suggests that the dating method is questionable.
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@Darchitect Another reader asked about how the skulls ending up so close together. As I responded below, the geological evidence indicates that the two fossils fell into a sediment trap, which later turned to rock. Later, a cave opening emerged below the skulls, and erosion gradually exposed the fossils in the new ceiling.
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@Carl Zimmer..Thanks for the possible explanation, but the coincidence that the two fall into an unchanging sediment trap after 40,000 years is difficult to accept. I assume the dating was double and triple checked.
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@Darchitect
Any arguments to back up your hypothesis that two fossils can't fall into the same sediment trap as soon as they've lived 40,000 years apart from each other ... ?
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It's great to see the writer responding to reader comments with added insight and information. Thanks for engaging, Carl Z.
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This is a shocking find. It was less than three years ago that I taught my students, on the first day of Global History 1, that homo sapiens first emerged 200 kya. A year later, teaching the same topic to a new group of students, I told them that the estimate had changed to 300 kya. I said it was so exciting that our knowledge of human origins was changing so quickly (my students did not find this idea exciting).
All that being said, even if there is no other explanation for this skull at the moment, I'm going to wait for at least one more piece of evidence before believing that homo sapiens left Africa 210 kya. At the rate discoveries are being made, that evidence could arrive very soon.
One thing to note is that the earliest homo sapiens remains, the remains that proved the new 300 kya estimate, were found in Morocco. It's not hard to think that in ninety thousand years, humans could get from Morocco to Greece.
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I vote we name the owner of the skull: The Diachronic Viceroy.
What was the state of the Mediterranean Sea at that time? Would expansion out of Africa necessarily have come through the Middle East?
There seems to be a trend for human sea-going to get pushed back to later and later dates, such as in the Philippines and Indonesia and Australia. Could this be related to that?
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@Gman I asked Dr. Harvati about whether Homo sapiens could have gotten to Europe another way, and she said the landscape was such that any other route would require boats--even via Gibraltar. And there isn't any compelling evidence of boat-building technology in our species 210,000 years ago. That being said, some researchers have argued that another species of Homo, Homo erectus, was able to get around on water in southeast Asia, so there's that...
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@Carl Zimmer
It's extremely nice of you to answer all of these questions. Very much appreciated!
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Too much to do over a single skull fragment. Perhaps a Neanderthal tribe practiced artificial cranial deformation? Or that this Neanderthal had a genetic mutation that shaped the skull differently? What was the climate like in Europe 210,000 years ago? Would it have supported modern humans? Neanderthals were well suited for very cold climates. Modern humans not so.
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@SS It turns out that the back of our skull is quite distinctive compared to the variations in Neanderthals and other extinct humans. In their study, the researchers compared lots of individuals to see where the Apidima 1 fit in. It's very much a Homo sapiens. There's no evidence of Neanderthals doing cranial deformation, and it would be hard to imagine how they could safely get rid of the bun-like bulge at the back of their skulls and make it more round. Neanderthals lived not only in Europe, but in the Near East and Central Asia, so they could withstand a range of climates. So could Homo sapiens.
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The story raises a troubling question which, until,answered, makes me skeptical of the findings. What are the odds that a single backpack size rock would happen to contain fragments from two different skulls, one that is 170,000 years old and the other 210,00 years old?
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@David Kalergis Studying the geology of the cave, Dr. Harvatia and her colleagues suspect that a long series of events put the two skulls close to each other in the ceiling of Apidima Cave. Apidima 1 tumbled into a hole over 210,000 years ago. Tens of thousands of years later, Apidima 2 fell in as well. Then the hole gradually filled with rock. Later, a cave opening emerged below the skulls, and erosion gradually exposed the fossils in the new ceiling.
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Well written article, but I’m still skeptical. Much appreciative of the interaction.
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Hi Carl,
I'm very curious about why it took that long (from 1978 to 2019) to reach those conclusions. Hope you can provide some insights on the intricacies that the scientific teams go through.
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@JLopez That is one of the fascinating aspects of this study. It's easy to get the impression that science happens at top speed, when the reality is that it can creep along for years. In this case, just preparing the fossils out of the rock was an enormous challenge, because the rock was so hard and the skulls were fragmented. You have to also consider that museums typically have backlogs of material to prepare, so that can slow things down more. And when the fossils were first found, they seemed very hard to study, because scientists didn't have a lot of tools to reconstruct the shape of the skulls. Dr. Harvati and other experts have developed scanning methods in recent years that finally make it possible to come to confident conclusions about these kinds of remains. Much the same story was the case for the Denisovan jaw in Tibet I wrote about recently, found in 1980: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/science/denisovans-tibet-jawbone-dna.html
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In the last paragraphs, you mention the theory attempting to explain how the older-than-expected fossils found in modern-day Greece and Israel may have been part of a later and different migration 70kya. What do you mean by 'test[ing] this idea' using data on the ground? Could you share specifics on where to read more on the questions and data sources that scientists are currently using/aiming to use?
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@L Wedekind Compared to other parts of Europe, Greece has been relatively neglected by paleoanthropologists. Only last year, Dr. Harvati and her colleagues published the discovery of an elephant butchery site in Greece dating back 400,000 years. (No human fossils there, alas.) Filling out the fossil record in Greece might allow them to test the hypothesis that there was at least one early wave of Homo sapiens that expanded out of Africa and reached Europe, which ended before the continuous presence of modern humans since 45,000 years ago.
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Mr. Author, please get this straight: this was the oldest homo sapiens found on the European continent, not the oldest human. Neanderthal, homo erectus, homo floriensis, etc., were all humans too.
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@L'Anonyme "Homo sapiens" is the name of our species. There are a set of anatomical traits that distinguish Homo sapiens from other related groups, as there are a set of mutations in our genome that are distinct. Other species in the genus Homo (all of which are extinct) are sometimes referred to as "human," but that's a more informal term.
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@Carl Zimmer "Homo sapiens" implies wisdom is unique to our species. I'm not convinced a) that our species is wise, or b) that we are more human than our predecessors.
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It is just a name on the classification system of Linnaeus. If our species is the only one of the genus homo to survive it shows that the mutations and adaptations have served us well thus far. The fact that we can study ourselves and our forebears for scientific understanding demonstrates the evolution of intelligence.
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