A groundbreaking international study has uncovered the oldest physical evidence of interbreeding between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, pushing back the timeline for their biological interactions by over 80,000 years.
The research, led by Prof. Israel Hershkovitz of Tel Aviv University and Anne Dambricourt-Malassé of the French National Centre for Scientific Research, focused on a 140,000-year-old skeleton of a five-year-old child found in Israel’s Skhul Cave. The findings were published in the journal L’Anthropologie.
Discovered approximately 90 years ago, the fossil was reanalyzed using advanced micro-CT scanning and 3D modeling. The study found that the child’s skull, while having the general cranium shape characteristic of Homo sapiens, possesses key features pertaining to Neanderthals. These include the structure of the inner ear, the lower jaw, and the intracranial blood supply system.
Hershkovitz said that this fossil predates previous genetic evidence significantly, which suggests that interbreeding occurred much later, between 60,000 and 40,000 years ago.
“Here, we are talking about a human fossil that is 140,000 years old,” he said, highlighting the dramatic shift in understanding human evolutionary history.
Group of ancient Neanderthals lived in Land of Israel 400,000 years ago
This discovery builds upon Hershkovitz’s prior research, which established that a group of ancient Neanderthals, known as “Nesher Ramla Men,” lived in the Land of Israel as far back as 400,000 years ago. This means they were already present when Homo sapiens populations began migrating out of Africa around 200,000 years ago.
The Skhul child’s skeleton is now considered the earliest fossil evidence of the social and biological connections forged between these two populations over thousands of years.
According to the research, the child from the Skhul Cave is a direct result of “a continuous gene flow from the local – and older – Neanderthal populations into the Homo sapiens ones.”
This suggests that the local Neanderthals were not a separate, competing species – they gradually absorbed into the Homo sapiens population. The process is now believed to have occurred in the Middle East much earlier than in Europe, where a similar absorption of later Neanderthal populations took place.