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 widely accepted trace of our species outside Africa: around 185,000 years old by three dating methods, nearly twice the age of the region's famous Skhul and Qafzeh people. The jaw lay among stone tools made with the full Levallois technique, tying the appearance of Homo sapiens in the Levant to that of a new way of shaping stone.

Why it matters

Small groups were crossing into western Asia long before the exit that counted demographically, then vanishing without descendants among us: genetics finds no trace of them in living people. Misliya turns the exodus 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. This entry 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