A scrap of skullcap collected in 1978 and stored for decades in an Athens museum may rewrite the timeline of our species leaving our ancestral African homeland.
A new analysis of the Apidima 1 fossil, named for the Greek cave where it was found, suggests it’s 210,000 years old, which would make it the oldest evidence of Homo sapiens outside Africa.
The find comes just a year after a separate team announced that a partial jaw from Misliya, Israel, was 177,000 to 194,000 years old. Along with 120,000-year-old fossils from China and elsewhere, the Misliya-1 specimen challenged the long-held notion that our species did not leave Africa until about 60,000 years ago.
