This ancient jawbone suggests our species left Africa 40,000 years earlier than expected

In a collapsed cave on the western slope of Mount Carmel in Israel, researchers have found the jawbone of an ancient human who may have been one of the first modern members of our species to leave Africa. Here, in a huge cave by the Mediterranean Sea, ancient people roasted hare, turtle, and ostrich eggs and knapped stone tools from flint. If the researchers’ dates of 177,000 to 194,000 years for the jaw and tools hold up, it means that modern humans left Africa 40,000 years earlier than expected. The find may have implications for when and how our species arose, and how many waves of early humans left Africa.

Before now, the earliest modern human fossils outside Africa came from the nearby Skhul Cave on Mount Carmel and Qafzeh Cave in Israel, sites dated to between 80,000 to 120,000 years old. But our species arose in Africa some 300,000 years ago, according to new dates on a skull in Morocco last year, and some researchers have claimed an early exodus from Africa based on fragmentary fossils and stone tools in the Middle East, Arabia, and China. But securely dated sites with accepted human fossils outside of Africa have been lacking.

The upper jaw described in Science today was discovered in 2002 by students digging in the floor of Misliya Cave, the remains of a collapsed cave carved into the cliffs on the western slopes of Mount Carmel, 12 kilometers south of Haifa, Israel. From the first look at the upper jawbone, which retains a complete row of teeth on its left side, the researchers knew it was a member of our species, Homo sapiens. Its canine and other teeth resemble those of the modern humans at Skhul and Qafzeh, and it lacked features found in Neandertals.

The jawbone was excavated in the same sedimentary layer as thousands of “museum quality” handaxes and flint tools, says co-author Mina Evron of the University of Haifa. The tools were crafted with a sophisticated method called Levallois technology, which requires abstract thinking. Some researchers have suggested the method was invented by H. sapiens and may mark our species’s presence and early steps out of Africa.