Humans: Out of Israel ?

Jennifer Viegas - 

Eight small teeth found in an Israeli cave raise the possibility that modern humans originated in Israel and not Africa, suggests a paper recently published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

The teeth date to the Middle Pleistocene and are similar in size and shape to teeth attributed to hominids from other sites in Israel, such as Skhul and Qafzeh. Researchers excavated these latest remains from Qesem Cave in central Israel.

"The Qesem teeth come from a time period between 200,000 to 400,000 years ago when human remains from the Middle East are very scarce," co-author Rolf Quam said in a Binghamton University press release.

Quam, an anthropologist at the university, added, "We have numerous remains of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens from more recent times, that is around 60,00 to 150,000 years ago, but fossils from earlier time periods are rare. So these teeth are providing us with some new information about who the earlier occupants of this region were as well as their potential evolutionary relationships with the later fossils from this same region."

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Photo Rolf Quam

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