Conny Waters – AncientPages.com – A remarkable skull found in South Africa challenges the theory of evolution. This 260,000-year-old skull is extraordinary because the frontal bone of this individual, dated to around 260,000 years ago, has a completely modern shape.
When and where did the first human appear? For years, archaeologists and scientists have tried to answer this troublesome question and new discoveries keep forcing us to re-evaluate our understanding of human beginnings.
The 260,000-year-old Florisbad skull. Credit: Smithsonian Insтιтution
The fossil found in South Africa in 1932 suggests a spatial relationship between face and cranial vault very similar to that of Homo sapiens, although the frontal lobes are particularly broad, like in H. neanderthalensis. Nonetheless, the parietal bone displays an anatomy very similar to more archaic species such as H. heidelbergensis.
“The Florisbad remains are often hypothesized to belong to an early Homo sapiens population.
A link with modern southern African San was supposed soon after the discovery, and Dreyer (1935) proposed the specific name of Homo (Africanthropus) helmei to characterize this intermediate morpH๏τype. However,
later analyses were not able to support the hypothesis of a regional continuity based on local
features.
Something that was also noticed from early on, was a similarity with Neandertals, largely because of the fronto-parietal curvature and browridge morphology,” researchers write in their science paper.
“The Florisbad cranium might be key to investigating the origin of our species. It could be from a very early population of Homo sapiens or an extinct group belonging to another independent, parallel human lineage,” says Emiliano Bruner, a paleoneurologist at the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH).
Skull from Florisbad. Credit: E. Bruner et al
Fossils with a mixture of more highly evolved characters in the face and more primitive ones in the posterior regions of the cranium have also been found in Europe and Asia, which corroborates the idea that human evolution did not proceed linearly but mosaically.
Skulls like this one and the mysterious 210,00-year-old Apidima skull may have completely re-written human history turning all we know about ourselves more or less upside down. The Apidima fossil is very interesting because examination of the ancient skull revealed it belonged to an individual with anatomically modern features.
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This skull is extraordinary because it could be the earliest example of Homo sapiens ever discovered outside the African continent. If scientists are not mistaken, then the skull is 160,000 years older than any Homo sapiens fossil previously found in Europe.
Maybe modern humans appeared much earlier than previously thought.
Written by Conny Waters – AncientPages.com Staff Writer
