ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
A team of archaeologists in Israel has discovered the oldest known fossil of a modern human outside of Africa. As NPR's Rhitu Chatterjee reports, the discovery suggests that the first humans left Africa much earlier than previously believed.
RHITU CHATTERJEE, BYLINE: The archaeologists were on the slopes of Mount Carmel on Israel's west coast. They were digging in a cave.
MINA WEINSTEIN-EVRON: The cave is one of a series of prehistoric caves.
CHATTERJEE: Mina Weinstein-Evron is at the University of Haifa, and she led the study. She says the cave had been occupied over a hundred thousand ago. Among stone tools and animal bones, she and her team also found a single piece of a fossilized skull. It was the upper-left jaw bone with all the teeth intact. Weinstein-Evron says it looked remarkably similar to present-day humans.
WEINSTEIN-EVRON: Looked quite modern from the start.
CHATTERJEE: So modern as in modern human, like, as in Homo sapiens.
WEINSTEIN-EVRON: It's really like us. I don't see you, but it's like you and me.
CHATTERJEE: A detailed analysis confirmed that the fossil belongs to our species. Now, scientists had found fossils of humans in other caves and Mount Carmel before, but this one is about 180,000 years old. That's 60,000 years older than any other modern human fossil outside of Africa. Anthropologist Israel Hershkovitz of Tel Aviv University says it was a real surprise.
ISRAEL HERSHKOVITZ: We were not expecting to find a modern human so early in time.
CHATTERJEE: Other scientists are excited about the new study, which was published today in the journal Science. Michael Petraglia, who wasn't involved in the study, is at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
MICHAEL PETRAGLIA: This is an outstanding discovery. It is a big deal. And I was very surprised that this find came out of nowhere.
CHATTERJEE: Now, one school of thought was that humans left Africa all at once in a short period of time. But Petraglia says the new finding suggests that our journey out of that continent was more complicated.
PETRAGLIA: It suggests and supports a model where there were multiple waves of Homo sapiens out of Africa starting at a very early point.
CHATTERJEE: Paleoanthropologist Rick Potts of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History says it makes sense. He says groups of humans were just exploring, looking over the next hill and down the next valley.
RICK POTTS: And they kept going. They didn't have maps. They didn't know whether they were in Africa or wherever. They were just simply following where perhaps the game was with good, food resources were good for eating and there was water.
CHATTERJEE: Most of these groups eventually died out, he says, including the ones found in this cave. Genetic evidence suggests that it was only about 60,000 years ago that a group of humans left Africa and eventually succeeded in spreading across the globe. Rhitu Chatterjee, NPR News.