PEOPLING

A First Step Out of Africa

~185,000 years ago (disputed)

Palaeolithic · Middle Stone Age · Saalian glacial

Half an upper jaw with its teeth, found in a collapsed cave on Mount Carmel, is the earliest trace of our species outside Africa: around 185,000 years old by three dating methods, twice the age of the region's famous Skhul and Qafzeh people. The jaw lay among stone tools made with the full Levallois technique, linking the arrival of Homo sapiens in the Levant to the arrival of a new way of shaping stone.

Why it matters

Leaving Africa was not one event. Long before the expansion that peopled the world, small groups were already crossing into western Asia, then vanishing without descendants among us; genetics finds no trace of them in living people. The dispersal that mattered demographically came much later. Misliya turns the exodus story from a single gate into a long history of doors opened, closed and reopened.

Dating & uncertaintyDisputed

The fossil is not in doubt; its age is. Three independent methods date the Misliya maxilla to between 194,000 and 177,000 years. A published comment argues the uranium-series data on adhering crusts support only a minimum age of 70,000 to 60,000 years; the discoverers reply that discounting those crusts changes little, since the other methods stand. The fiche keeps the older reading, and the dispute with it.

Sources

1. Hershkovitz et al. (2018), Science · The earliest modern humans outside Africadoi:10.1126/science.aap8369
2. Sharp & Paces (2018), Science · Comment on "The earliest modern humans outside Africa"doi:10.1126/science.aat6598
3. Hershkovitz et al. (2018), Science · Response to Comment on "The earliest modern humans outside Africa"doi:10.1126/science.aat8964

Our species’ history as one day

09:54:1714 h 6 min before midnight

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