PEOPLING

An Early Foray Into Europe

~210,000 years ago

Palaeolithic · Middle Stone Age · MIS 7

Two crania sat side by side in a block of cemented rubble in Apidima Cave, on the southern coast of Greece. A 2019 reanalysis argued that the more damaged one, Apidima 1, is an early Homo sapiens at least 210,000 years old, while its neighbour is a Neanderthal some 40,000 years younger. If the attribution holds, this is the earliest trace of our species outside Africa: an early foray that did not last, in a cave later held by Neanderthals.

Why it matters

Out of Africa was not one march but many attempts. Misliya, Apidima, Qafzeh: each records a population that reached the edge of Eurasia long before the dispersal that peopled the world, and each faded. Apidima also shows how much can ride on one interpretation: the same crushed braincase reads as one of us to one team, and as a Neanderthal ancestor to another.

Dating & uncertaintyDisputed

The claim rests on the reconstructed back of a single damaged skull and on uranium-series dates. The 2019 study reads Apidima 1 as an early Homo sapiens at least 210,000 years old. Two 2020 reanalyses reject the attribution, reading the same fragment as a Neanderthal-lineage fossil, which would remove the earliest sapiens from Europe and leave the cave to one lineage.

Sources

1. Harvati et al. (2019), Nature · Apidima Cave fossils provide earliest evidence of Homo sapiens in Eurasiadoi:10.1038/s41586-019-1376-z
2. Rosas & Bastir (2020), L'Anthropologie · An assessment of the late Middle Pleistocene occipital from Apidima 1 skull (Greece)doi:10.1016/j.anthro.2020.102745
3. de Lumley et al. (2020), L'Anthropologie · Apidima 1 and Apidima 2: two anteneandertal skulls in the Peloponnese, Greecedoi:10.1016/j.anthro.2019.102743

Our species’ history as one day

08:00:0016 h before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day