A 55,000-year-old skull discovered in Israel provides evidence that the Neanderthals and modern humans met some 50,000 to 60,000 years ago.
The fossilized skull of a Homo sapien was unearthed in a cave located in northern Israel recently. The excavators named it "Manot," after the cave's name. The researchers used advanced dating technique, including computer tomography, to calculate the age of the fossil, which could have been part of a female.
"Manot clearly shows that Neanderthals and modern human lived side by side in Israel for a long period of time," co-author Israel Hershkovitz of Tel Aviv University told Discovery News. "All recent genetic and archaeological studies predict that the interbreeding event between the Neanderthals and modern humans occurred between 50,000-60,000 years ago, and in the Near East."
Hershkovitz worked with other Israeli scientists, as well as anthropologists from the University of Vienna and the Max Planck Institute, and compared the data of the Manot to other ancient human skulls. They all agreed that the fossil belonged to a modern human that lived in the area between 20,000 and 30,000 years ago-- much earlier than the Europeans.
The top of the skull of Manot 300 millimeters smaller compared to those of modern humans, which average around 1,400 millimeters. There is little resemblance of the African and ancient European skulls, but significantly differences when compared to modern humans from Israel.
Further analysis of the features of Manot showed that it is a "hybrid," a possible interbred of the Neanderthals and the early Homo sapiens. It also provided evidence that our ancestors migrated from East Africa to Israel by crossing the Nubian Desert and Sinai Peninsula.
"The coexistence of these two populations in a confined geographic region at the same time that genetic models predict interbreeding promotes the notion that interbreeding may have occurred in the Levant region," Hershkovitz told Live Science.
The researchers plan to excavate the cave where Manot was found to search for more fossils.
The study was published in the Jan. 28 issue of Nature.
