Creative Common images from Il Fatto Storico
These fossils shake things up. Two fragments of human skull crania were found in Apidima Cave in Southern Greece during the late 1970s, but radiocarbon dating failed and typology was difficult with the partial survival. They were found close together, lodged down a crevice.
The authors of the report applied U-series radiometric method to date Apidima 2 to more than 170,000 bp and propose that it has Neanderthal features.
Apidima 1 (images above), they have dated using the same method to more than 210,000 years ago, and have assigned to it a morphology of mixed primitive and modern features. This surprised the researchers as it had been wrongly assumed that the two fragments were found so close to each other (centimetres) that they shared a single context and time.
Apidima 1 described as having some modern features, is an extraordinary claim, as is the title of the Nature publication. It suggests arrival of anatomically modern humans (Homo Sapiens) into SE Europe at an extraordinary early date.
(Note # the Homo sapiens designation for Apidima 1 remains hotly debated due to the fragmentary nature of the skull).
The emergence of fossils that we regard as anatomically modern has shifted further back in time. I recall when the Cromagnon fossils of Europe, dated then to circa 40,000 years ago were regarded as the oldest in the world. But finds from both out of Levant and Africa began to challenge this. Eventually, Omo-Kibish and Herto in Ethiopia were hailed as the oldest fossil finds of modern Homo sapiens. They were dated to circa 195,000 years bp. A recent research publication has revised the dating of these proximal deposits of the finds to 233 ± 22 kyr. Yes, 220,000 years ago:
It doesn't end there.
The fossils designated to be Homo sapiens found at Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, have been dated 315,000 ybp.
The age of the hominin fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, and the origins of the Middle Stone Age. Nature 2017. Richter, Grün, Joannes-Boyau etal.
In conclusion, it would appear that the anatomical features we associate with modern Homo sapiens did not emerge all at once in a single cradle, but rather piecemeal across a vast, interconnected pan-African network starting over 300,000 years ago. The evidence of much earlier expansions of Homo erectus out of Africa proves that the geography of Eurasia was accessible to early hominins. If the controversial Homo sapiens designation for Apidima 1 holds true against its critics, it reveals that our own species was testing those same migratory corridors into Europe over 200,000 years ago—long before the permanent Upper Palaeolithic settlements took root.
