The early history of our species needs to be rewritten – again. A human jawbone from a cave in Israel has proven to be at least 177,000 years old, indicating that Homo sapiens left its African birthplace at least 50,000 years earlier than thought. The find solves several mysteries of human evolution, but also creates new ones.
Most scientists agree that our species evolved in Africa within the last few hundred thousand years. It was not until around 70,000 years ago that we trekked into Asia, and from there to every continent.
However, there were earlier forays out of Africa. Until now, the oldest widely accepted evidence was from sites at Skhul and Qafzeh in Israel, dating to around 120,000 years ago. These outposts are generally thought to have been “dead ends”, meaning that the people who lived there have not left any living descendants. Such outposts probably either withered or got wiped out by later human migrations from Africa.
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±·´Ç·ÉĚýÂ of Tel Aviv University in Israel and his colleagues have pushed the date of our first extra-African excursion back by at least 50,000 years.
±ő˛ÔĚýÂ on the slopes of Mount Carmel in Israel, around 7 kilometres from the other sites, they have found the upper jawbone and teeth of a human. Three independent laboratories have dated the remains, using three techniques, and all agree that they are between 177,000 and 194,000 years old.
“The hominins from Skhul were considered the first outside Africa,” says Hershkovitz. “Now we know it is not the case.” He suspects the people living at Skhul and Qafzeh are descended from those at Misliya, and that the area was continuously settled for tens of thousands of years.
Nice place to live
The area around Misliya Cave was a good choice of home, says team member  of the University of Haifa, Israel. “It lies high up in Mount Carmel. It’s about 90 metres above the sea level of today, but at the time it must have been 200 to 250 metres above sea level. They were overlooking the coast.” So both pleasant and with seafood to hand.
Like all hominins at that time, they were hunter-gatherers. “They hunted mainly gazelles, probably with flint points that they fabricated,” says Weinstein-Evron. They also ate aurochs – the wild ancestors of domestic cattle – wild goats, hares, turtles and even ostrich eggs. There is also evidence that they ate plant material, such as tubers, and that they made bedding or matting. “They were smart,” she says.
Experts contacted by żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ have broadly accepted the findings. “The first forays out of Africa were clearly earlier than previously thought, and it may be that there were multiple dispersals” says  of the Natural History Museum in London, UK.
The Misliya jawbone may not even be the oldest H. sapiens outside Africa, adds Galway-Witham. “Genetic studies of Neanderthal DNA indicate that there was a period of interbreeding between H. sapiens and Neanderthals between about 460,000 and 219,000 years ago,” she says. Neanderthal remains have only ever been found in Europe and Asia, so any such interbreeding presumably occurred outside Africa.
A year ago, the Misliya findings might have been more controversial. At that time the oldest confirmed H. sapiens, from Omo Kibish in Ethiopia, . However, in June 2017 researchers showed that skulls found at Jebel Irhoud in Morocco were primitive H. sapiens, and were at least 315,000 years old.
“Our species is much older than we previously thought,” says Hershkovitz. So it makes sense that we also left Africa at an earlier time.
A history rewritten
Some aspects of our prehistory now make more sense, while others have become more mysterious.
One that now looks comprehensible is the settlement of Australia. In July 2017, archaeologists found evidence that humans were living there 65,000 years ago, much earlier than thought (). That was difficult to explain if humans only left Africa 70,000 years ago, but makes sense if there was an earlier exit.
Similarly, there have been many claims that modern humans were living in Asia – particularly China – around 100,000 years ago, or even earlier. Many archaeologists have been sceptical, but the idea now looks much less outlandish.
However, some things still don’t quite fit. One Chinese specimen, the Dali skull, has been reliably dated to 260,000 years ago and appears to be an archaic H. sapiens. It is much older than the Misliya fossil, suggesting an even earlier jaunt out of Africa. However, it is still compatible with the 315,000-year-old fossils at Jebel Irhoud.
Changing brains
A second paper, published on Wednesday, indicates that these migrations out of Africa happened while our brains were still changing shape.
 of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and his colleagues examined how human braincases changed shape over evolutionary time. Overall, they became less elongated and more globular.
Neubauer looked at three groups of fossils. The oldest were 300,000 to 200,000 years old. Their braincases “look really archaic”, he says. A second group from around 100,000 years ago “look more modern but still different from present-day humans”. The final set are all “younger than 35,000 years old” and are “within the variation of present-day humans”.
“The data suggests the modern shape was established at some point between 100,000 years ago and 35,000 years ago,” says Neubauer. This accords with archaeological evidence that humans began behaving in much more complex, “modern” ways 40-50,000 years ago, a period called the Great Leap Forward. However, the more modern brain shape was evidently not needed to make the move out of Africa.
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