Waching daily Mar 27 2018

This discovery, this fragment of maxilla

has shed a good amount of light on the origins of our species and its voyage out of Africa

because, to this day, it is our species' most ancient fossil we have found,

from our lineage, out of Africa. Some colleagues, even,

dare to say that it is the oldest fossil known of our species.

Misliya's Maxilla - The First Homo Sapiens Out of Africa

It has enlighten us about something that we knew less about, until now:

we know less about the origins of Homo sapiens than the origins of Neanderthals.

The importance of these rests is that, 200.000 years ago,

the typical, important, clear features of a Homo sapiens had appeared already.

Our collaboration in this work started 10 years ago,

more especifically, in that year's excavation campaign, in 2008, in Atapuerca.

Israel Hershkovitz, who is responsible of these fossils,

along with Mina Weinstein,

in one of those evenings, they came here, to the Laboratory Of Human Evolution,

it was when he showed us this fossil's original and he asked

for our opinion.

And we all got to the conclusion that, especifically,

this half maxilla showed very clear morphological features of Homo sapiens

and it was when he told us he didn't have absolute dating yet

but, by some relative dating, it could be 200.000 years old,

which left all of us astonished

because it meant taking backwards quite a lot sapiens' cronology ouf of Africa.

For example, here we have a replica of a Neanderthal's skull and here

a modern human's skull.

We can see the shape of the dental arch is

completely different from one another.

In Neanderthals it has a shape more like a U

on us, it has a U shape but quite more closed.

What we see in our replica and in our reconstruction is that our human from Israel

has the same closed U morphology, as in the

modern human.

There is a feature in the teeth that, undoubtedly, provides us with the key

of why we are looking at a sapiens, why this fossil belongs to a Homo sapiens.

Neanderthals have a typical shape of 4 cusp tips in every teeth:

in the first one, the second one and the third one.

However, in moder humans we find

a huge variety.

Actually, in the first molar we have

four cusp tips, it is very common, but in the second and third molar there are a whole lot of variation

and cusp tips can be even lost.

In the second molar we see it has three cusp tips:

one, two, three. It doesn't have a fourth one, which is

very typical of Homo sapiens, and very unlikely in Neanderthals

and, moreover, in molar 3, if we look closely, it has only two cusp tips.

With this feature, we have no doubt that we are looking at a Homo sapiens.

We worked on the study for several years. It wasn't very complex

but we kept introducing more data.

Above all, where there were a lot of work was in the dating aspect,

refining well those datings.

Ever since we sent that first draft to Science magazine,

it might have taken around a year.

This article's publication has had an enormous repercussion

in mass media.

I think none of the authors expected it to be so much. We knew it was important news,

moving back the first exit from Africa of Homo sapiens.

But indeed, its media resonance has been impressive.

This fossil opens the posibility that, for example,

the contact with Neanderthals had been much older

and it might have been going on for much more time.

Not only with Neanderthals, because there could be,

and, in fact, it seem there had been, other human species in that area.

Which implies that maybe our genertic heritage is

more mixed than we could think.

And probably we will need more fossils to solve many of these enigmas

but this fossil provides us with a depth of field

much more interesting than we had until now.