A skull fragment found in Greece has inspired a startling hypothesis about when our species first arrived in Europe and immediately generated excitement and skepticism among experts who study how and when Homo sapiens dispersed from Africa.
Researchers say the fossilized skull, found in the late 1970s in a cave in southeast Greece and stored since then in a museum, belonged to an individual with anatomically modern features who lived about 210,000 years ago. If true, it would be earliest example of Homo sapiens discovered outside the African continent. The date also precedes by a whopping 160,000 years the age of any Homo sapiens fossil previously found in Europe.
The bold claim, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, comes from a respected team of researchers, but it was met with caution from a number of other paleoanthropologists who were not involved in the research. Disagreement is not unusual for this field, in which hypotheses and conjectures about human prehistory can emerge from a solitary jawbone or even a finger. Fossils are rare, difficult to date and usually fragmentary, and human prehistory is inherently a misty narrative. https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/07/10/enigmatic-skull-suggests-our-human-species-reached-europe-years-ago/