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March 15, 2015

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Skull offers clues about our ancestors

A 55,000-year-old partial skull found in the Middle East gives clues to when our ancestors left their African homeland, and strengthens theories they co-habited with Neanderthals, scientists said recently.

Found in Manot Cave in western Galilee, north Israel, the cranium has the characteristics of an early Homo sapiens, as modern humans are called, they said.

Manot is just a few dozen kilometers to the north and northwest of two other sites — the Kebara and Amud caves — where Neanderthal remains had been found.

Those relics were dated to between 50,000 and 65,000 years of age: in other words, humans from two species may have been contemporaries — possibly even neighbors.

“It has been suspected that modern man and Neanderthals were in the same place at the same time, but we didn’t have the physical evidence,” said Bruce Latimer, a paleontologist at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio.

“Now we do have it, in the new fossil,” he added.

Neanderthals are an enigmatic branch of the human tree, whose fossils and bone tools have been found in Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia.

Their record peters out about 30,000 years ago — a strange ending that has triggered speculation they were either wiped out by H. sapiens, the new and smarter hominid on the block, or that they disappeared because they interbred with us.

Once considered outlandish, the sex-with-Neanderthals theory has gained a lot of ground since 2010, thanks to analysis of DNA coaxed from Neanderthal bones.

This suggests about 2 percent of the genetic heritage of non-African humans today comes from Neanderthals. It is higher among Europeans, who may have up to around 4 percent.

The new research shows it is possible that Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalis may have encountered one another, said Latimer.

“Both modern humans and Neanderthals contemporaneously inhabited the southern Levant, close in time to the likely interbreeding event with Neanderthals,” said the paper published in science journal Nature.

Until now, theories for interbreeding have suggested it took place much later, and in Europe. he cranium, according to the scientists, may have belonged to an early H. sapiens colonizer — part of a wave out of Africa, the cradle of humanity, perhaps 60,000 years ago.

The rounded shape of the skull is clearly that of a modern human, but it also has a bony formation, called a bun, on the back that we do not — or no longer — have.

H. sapiens probably left Africa to benefit from a warm, damp climate in the Northern Sahara and Mediterranean, said one of the authors of the study.




 

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