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.
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