Ancient Mystery Deepens: Fossil Found Outside Africa Challenges Human Origins Timeline
Katerina Harvati, Eberhard Karls University of TübingenThe Apidima 2 was found to be at least 170,000 years old and that of a Neanderthal.
But Harvati and her colleagues believe the fragment’s curvature points to it having belonged to the back of a human skull.
The newly dated fossil has had a long, decades-old journey to arrive at the point of published theory. Discovered in the Apidima cave in southern Greece in 1978, it was so damaged that it was relegated to an Athens museum to gather dust.
A second skull found during the dig did get analyzed thoroughly, as it retained a complete face and seemed to be a promising find. This fossil, named Apidima 2, turned out to belong to a Neanderthal — and thereby didn’t have any earth-shattering consequences regarding the timeline of early human migration.
Harvati and her team decided to examine them both, nonetheless. By taking CT scans of the two skulls, they were able to create virtual 3D reconstructions that they could precisely compare with skulls from early Homo sapiens, Neanderthals, and modern humans.
What they found with the second skull was that it had a pronounced, round brow ridge that confirmed it as Neanderthal. The other one, however, appeared strikingly similar to that of a modern human — with the most notable evidence being the skull’s lack of a Neanderthal bulge on the back the head.
Katerina Harvati, Eberhard Karls University of TübingenKaterina Harvati and her team used CT scans to create virtual 3D models of the two fossils, and then compared them with fossils of Neanderthal, Homo sapiens, and modern humans.
“The part that is preserved, the back of the skull, is very diagnostic in differentiating Neanderthals and modern humans from each other and from earlier archaic humans,” Harvati explained.
Post Comment