Misliya jaw: an early Homo sapiens beyond Africa
- Date
- c. 194,000–177,000 years ago
- Category
- Exploration & colonisation
- Region
- Western Asia (Levant, Israel)
- Era
- Prehistory
- Significance
An upper jawbone with most of its teeth, recovered from Misliya Cave on Mount Carmel in Israel and analysed in detail in 2018, dates to roughly 177,000–194,000 years ago.
It is the earliest known fossil of Homo sapiens found outside Africa, predating other Levantine modern-human remains (such as those at Skhul and Qafzeh) by tens of thousands of years. The anatomy of the maxilla and teeth places it firmly within the modern human range, and the find was associated with sophisticated Levallois stone-tool technology. Misliya shows that members of our species had reached the Levant far earlier than the major Out-of-Africa expansion around 70,000–60,000 years ago — implying multiple, sometimes short-lived, dispersals out of the African homeland. Such early excursions may have left limited genetic trace in living non-Africans, but they demonstrate that the boundary of the modern human range was already shifting into south-west Asia in the late Middle Pleistocene, overlapping in time and space with Neanderthal populations.
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Related exploration & colonisation events
- Dmanisi: the earliest well-dated humans in Eurasiac. 1.8 million years ago
- Pre-Clovis America: Monte Verde and the Pacific coastal routec. 16,000–14,500 years ago
- Settlement of Sahul: human occupation of Australia at Madjedbebec. 65,000 years ago
- White Sands footprints: humans in the Americas during the Last Glacial Maximumc. 23,000–21,000 years ago
- Earliest human occupation of the high-altitude Tibetan Plateauc. 40,000 – 30,000 years ago
- Earliest humans reach Asia: stone tools at Shangchen, Chinac. 2.1 million years ago
Further reading
The wider story
The Ancient Near East: A Very Short Introduction
Concise, expert intro to Mesopotamia, Persia and the Near East before Alexander.
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