PEOPLING

Apidima: an Early Sapiens in Europe

~210,000 years ago

Palaeolithic · Middle Stone Age · MIS 7

A damaged skull from a Greek cave, at least 210,000 years old, may be the oldest Homo sapiens outside Africa, an attribution still contested.

Apidima Cave is a palaeoanthropological site on the coast of the Mani peninsula, in Laconia, southern Greece, whose two human crania were recovered in the 1970s, lodged side by side in a single block of cemented rubble. The criterion separating Homo sapiens from the Neanderthal lineage is principally the shape of the braincase, rounded in the former, long and low in the latter. A reanalysis published in 2019 reconstructed the damaged rear of the less complete specimen, Apidima 1, interpreted it as rounded, and attributed it to an early Homo sapiens at least 210,000 years old; the second specimen, Apidima 2, is a Neanderthal dated by the same study to at least 170,000 years. If the attribution is accepted, this is the earliest trace of the species outside Africa.

Why it matters

The site belongs to a series of occupations, with Misliya and Qafzeh, attesting populations that reached the margins of Eurasia long before the dispersal that peopled the world, none of which left descendants among the living. It also illustrates how much interpretation a taxonomic attribution can involve: the diagnostic portion of the skull being precisely the part that was missing, it had to be reconstructed, and a reconstruction is an argument rather than an observation. The same fragment is assigned to Homo sapiens by one team and to the Neanderthal lineage by another.

Dating & uncertaintyDisputed

The whole case rests on the reconstructed rear of a single damaged cranium and on uranium-series dates obtained from the breccia that encased it. The 2019 study reads Apidima 1 as an early Homo sapiens at least 210,000 years old. Two reanalyses published in 2020 contest that attribution and assign the same fragment to the Neanderthal lineage. The consequence is direct: if they are well founded, Europe loses its oldest Homo sapiens, and the cave documents only a single lineage.

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