The team worked to strengthen their analyses of the skulls, and also attempted to date the fragment. But there's no physical evidence of these populations in such close proximity till around 60,000 years ago, so reviewers were “naturally skeptical” that the fossil was a modern human positioned so close to Neanderthal remains, says study author Chris Stringer of London's Natural History Museum.īy Rainer Grün Griffith University in Australia At the time, the researchers had assumed that the proximity of the fossils meant that they both were the same age, dated to at least 160,000 years ago. But Neanderthal heads are more elongated, with a protrusion known as a chignon, which is French for “bun.” The ancient skull fragment from Apidima lacks this elongation.Īt this point, the team submitted their analysis for publication, and they were rejected. If you put your hand to the back of your head, you should be able to feel it curve like a grapefruit. sapiens among the hominins, says paleoanthropologist Eric Delson of the City University of New York, who was not part of the research team but who wrote a Nature News and Views article accompanying the study.įor one, there’s the shape. It’s nearly as diagnostic as the chin-a trait unique to H. While a skull fragment might seem like a scanty piece of evidence for such a big conclusion, the back of the head holds a number of clues that can point to H. The resulting identity of the small skull fragment was the team’s first big surprise: It was remarkably similar to skulls of modern humans. Finally, the scientists compared the features of the reconstructions to a variety of skulls known to be either Homo sapiens or Neanderthal, as well as other Eurasian and African skulls of debated species that are dated to the Middle Pleistocene. Harvati and her team CT-scanned the fossils, and then two of the team members separately worked on virtual reconstructions, each using two different protocols in an attempt to reduce bias while digitally tweaking the fossils. So it’s a wonder of nature that you find the two together.” “In all of Greece, you have one more skull-that’s it-in that timeframe. “It’s a fantastic coincidence that you have two skulls together 30 centimeters apart,” marvels study author Rainer Grün of Griffith University in Australia. Who were the neanderthals? Do humans really share some of their DNA? Learn facts about Neanderthal man, the traits and tools of Homo neanderthalensis, and how the species fits into our evolution story. Eager to apply modern techniques to these well-known remains, she and her colleagues jumped at the opportunity. ( Find out how ancient DNA is revealing new twists in the story of Neanderthal migration.)Īs part of ongoing analyses of these enigmatic fossils, scientists at the University of Athen’s Museum of Anthropology reached out to Harvati to inquire if she was interested in studying them. The second skull fragment was mere inches away in the rock and was small-a single piece just larger than the size of an adult palm-so previous researchers concluded that it was likely the same species and age as the first. Still, past work identified the skull as a Neanderthal, a conclusion shared by the latest study. One skull was nearly complete, but it had been distorted during the millennia spent in its rocky casing. Even once removed from the rock, their identities weren’t initially obvious. For one, the fragmented skulls were encased in their rocky matrix until the late 1990s and early 2000s. But studying the Apidima fossils, as they came to be called, has involved many challenges. New techniques for old findsĭiscovered in the late 1970s, the skull fragments peeked out from a wall of Apidima Cave, a site outside the Peloponnesian town of Areopoli. “I was completely astonished,” he says of the team’s provocative conclusions. He and his colleagues’ 2017 analysis of a skull found nearby concluded that the remains were all likely Neanderthal origin, dating to at least 160,000 years ago. “I cannot see anything suggesting that the individual belongs to the sapiens lineage,” says Juan Luis Arsuaga, a paleoanthropologist from the University of Madrid. But not everyone is convinced by the strength of this new evidence. If confirmed, the discovery would help clarify the earliest movements of our species as anatomically modern humans spread out of Africa.
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