Skhul and Qafzeh hominins

The Skhul and Qafzeh hominins or Qafzeh–Skhul early modern humans are hominin fossils discovered in Es-Skhul and Qafzeh caves in Israel. They are today classified as Homo sapiens, among the earliest of their species in Eurasia. Skhul Cave is on the slopes of Mount Carmel; Qafzeh Cave is a rockshelter near Nazareth in Lower Galilee. The remains found at Es Skhul, together with those found at the Nahal Me'arot Nature Reserve and Mugharet el-Zuttiyeh, were classified in 1939 by Arthur Keith and Theodore D. McCown as Palaeoanthropus palestinensis, a descendant of Homo heidelbergensis.

Research history

Discovery In 1928, Mandatory Palestine planned to mine the cliffs of Nahal Me'arot (a valley in the Carmel mountain range) for construction of a deep-water harbour in the city of Haifa roughly 19 km (12 mi) north. The Department of Antiquities, already suspecting the archaeological value of the many openly visible caves in the area, sent the assistant director — C. Lambert — on a three-week trial excavation of El Wad in November. Lambert discovered several stone tools, quern-stones, beads, stone constructions, and human fossils, as well as the first published discovery of Near Eastern Stone Age art (an animal-shaped bone sickle). The British School of Archaeology at Jerusalem partnered with the American School of Prehistoric Research (ASPR) to fund seven field seasons from 1929 to 1934 of the region's caves under the direction of British archaeologist Dorothy Garrod.

She invited American archaeologist Theodore D. McCown to excavate Skhul Cave, who joined as a field representative of the ASPR as part of his graduate program with University of California, Berkeley. On 3 May 1931, McCown unearthed a fossil child skeleton (Skhul I); and on 30 April 1932 (with his assistant Hallam L. Movius), he discovered another skeleton (Skhul II), a partial skull and jaw (Skhul III), and a nearly complete skeleton (Skhul IV). On 3 May 1932, McCown and Movius discovered another nearly complete skeleton (Skhul V), and a partial skeleton (Skhul VI). McCown found another partial skull (Skhul VII) and child skeleton (Skhul VIII) on 13 May, a partial skeleton (Skhul IX) on 19 May, and an infant skeleton (Skhul X) while studying the material in 1935. The full excavation history of the site, archaeological finds, palaeoenvironmental studies, and anatomical description of the fossil material was published in a two-volume monograph in 1937; volume 1 published by Garrod and Welsh palaeontologist Dorothea Bate, and volume 2 by McCown and British anatomist Sir Arthur Keith. The skeletons were removed from stone matrices principally under the direction of McCown at the Royal College of Surgeons of England over the course of three years, aided by his assistants Margot Collett and W. C. Willmott. Keith and McCown were able to study the material at the Buckston Browne Research Farm, and afterwards they repatriated the material back to Mandatory Palestine. The material from Skhul Cave, as well as the nearby Tabun Cave, represented one of the most complete samples of the human fossil record at the time. In 1951, American anthropologist Francis Clark Howell recognised the similarities between the Skhul remains and human fossils exhumed about 35 km (22 mi) east from Qafzeh Cave by French consulate René Neuville beginning in 1934. The connection was initially unpopular because the Qafzeh material was unpublished and the stratigraphy and age were uncertain. In 1963, the Israeli ambassador to France, Walter Eytan, suggested to French palaeontologist Jean Piveteau to continue excavation of Qafzeh, which recommenced under Piveteau and his student Jean Perrot in July 1965. Their work cemented the connection between Skhul and Qafzeh.

Age and stratigraphy In 1937, Garrod and Bate divided the 2.5 m (8 ft 2 in) thick reddish-brown breccia of Skhul Cave into three layers: the 60 cm (2 ft) Layer A yielding pottery fragments and Middle to Upper Palaeolithic artefacts; the 2 m (6 ft 7 in) Layer B yielding at least 10 fossil individuals and around 9,800 stone tools; and the 30 cm (1 ft) Layer C yielding some stone tools of the same culture as Layer B. They concluded that Skhul Layers B and C are roughly contemporaneous with the Neanderthal fossils of Tabun Cave Layers B and C, and date to the Riss-Würm interglacial (the Middle Pleistocene) based on the animal remains (biostratigraphy). Layer B of Tabun lacks wild cattle and instead has a preponderance of gazelle, unlike the older Tabun C as well as Skhul B, so Garrod and Bate suggested that Tabun B was deposited in a younger, dryer period than Skhul B (presuming wild cattle require wetter conditions). That is, the Skhul B material which better resembles modern humans was older than the Tabun B material which better resembles Neanderthals. In 1957, Howell asserted that the Skhul and Tabun material must date to the Early Last Pluvial (the early Last Glacial Period during the Late Pleistocene). In 1961, British archaeologist Eric Sidney Higgs rejected Garrod and Bates' arguments for Skhul B dating to a wetter period older than Tabun B, suggesting Skhul B might actually be from a dry period younger than Tabun B. In general, most workers opted to date the Neanderthals of the region (Tabun, Amud, Kebara) to about 50,000 years ago, and the modern humans of Skhul and Qafzeh to 40,000 years ago. In 1988, French palaeontologist Hélène Valladas and colleagues dated stone tools from Qafzeh using thermoluminescence dating to about 90,000–100,000 years ago (at the time, nearly as old as some of the oldest modern human fossils from Africa). In 1989, British physical anthropologist Chris Stringer and colleagues used electron spin resonance dating of bovine teeth at Skhul to date the human fossils to roughly 80,000–100,000 years ago. This meant that modern humans quickly dispersed from Africa soon after evolution, but did not penetrate Europe for tens thousands of years. Further, Skhul and Qafzeh were older than Tabun and other Neanderthal sites, implying that modern humans were replaced by Neanderthals.

Classification

Raciology

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