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Jerusalem (AFP)
A new species of prehistoric man recently discovered in Israel questions the privileged thesis that Neanderthals emerged in Europe before migrating south, Israeli researchers said Thursday.
During archaeological excavations near the city of Ramla, in central Israel, the team of Dr. Yossi Zaidner, from the Archeology Department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, discovered prehistoric human remains that they did not find. could not attribute to any known Homo species.
In a study published in the journal Science, a team of anthropologists from Tel Aviv University and Dr. Zaidner’s team defined a new type of the genus Homo, the “Nesher Ramla”, named after the site where he was found.
The human bones discovered are believed to date from 140,000 to 120,000 years before our era, according to scientists.
They share characteristics in common with Neanderthal man at the level of the teeth and the jaw in particular, but also with other homo archaic types at the level of the skull.
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However, they differ from modern humans by the absence of a chin, the structure of the skull and the presence of very large teeth, the study said.
The authors claim to have also found, at a depth of eight meters, a significant quantity of animal bones, horses, deer and aurochs as well as stone tools.
For Dr. Zaidner, this “shows that Homo Nesher Ramla possessed advanced technologies for producing stone tools and most likely interacted with local Homo sapiens.”
“This discovery is particularly spectacular because it shows us that there were several types of Homo living in the same place and at the same time at this later stage of human evolution,” he continues.
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According to the study, several other fossils previously discovered in Israel that show similar characteristics can be attributed to this new homo type.
– A piece to the puzzle of evolution –
The discovery of Nesher Ramla questions the privileged thesis of the emergence of the Neanderthal in Europe which would then have migrated south.
“Nesher Ramla’s fossils make us question this theory, suggesting that the ancestors of European Neanderthals already lived in the Levant 400,000 years ago,” explains Professor Israel Hershkovitz of Tel Aviv University.
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“In fact, our findings imply that the famous Neanderthals of Western Europe are just the remains of a much larger population that lived here in the Levant – and not the other way around,” he adds.
Small groups of the Homo Nesher Ramla type migrated to Europe – where they evolved into the “classic” Neanderthals we know well, and also to Asia, where they became archaic populations with characteristics similar to those of Neanderthal, explains Dr. Rachel Sarig of Tel Aviv University, one of the study’s authors.
“Crossroads between Africa, Europe and Asia, the land of Israel served as a melting pot where different human populations mixed before spreading later throughout the Old World,” she explains.
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The discovery of a new type of Homo is of great scientific importance, concludes Professor Hershkovitz, because it allows to add another piece to the puzzle of human evolution and to understand the migrations of humans in the old one. world.
© 2021 AFP
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