New Fossil Found In Israel Suggests A Much Earlier Human Migration Out Of Africa

The fossil found in Misliya cave, showing details of the teeth. The details of the teeth – their shapes and sizes relative to each other — helped the scientists confirm that this belongs to Homo sapiens.

Gerhard Weber/University of Vienna/Science

Archaeologists in Israel have discovered the oldest fossil of a modern human outside Africa. The fossil suggests that humans first migrated out of the continent much earlier than previously believed.

The scientists were digging in a cave called Misliya, on the slopes of Mount Carmel on the northern coast of Israel. “The cave is one of a series of prehistoric caves,” says Mina Weinstein-Evron of the Zinman Institute of Archaeology at the University of Haifa, who led the team. “It’s a collapsed cave, but people lived there before it collapsed.”

The cave had been occupied for several hundred thousand years, she says.