ARCHAEOLOGISTS CLAIM FINDING PREHISTORIC HUMAN IN ISRAEL

Almost a decade ago, archaeologists in central Israel discovered the fragmentary remains of a very strange hominin skull. After years of study, the researchers revealed their conclusion on Thursday: It belonged to a previously unknown type of archaic humans.

The specimen, dubbed Homo Nesher Ramla after a limestone quarry in central Israel where it was found, lived between 140,000 and 120,000 years ago.

It may have been one of the last survivors of a very ancient group of prehistoric hominins, one that may have been ancestral to the European Neanderthal, its discoverers postulate, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported.

The discovery, made by a team of Israeli and international scholars, graced the cover of this week’s Science Magazine and was detailed in two articles, one discussing the skull itself and the other the masses of tools and animal bones unearthed with it.

“This fossil changes many of our views on human evolution and specifically on Neanderthals, which were thought to have originated in Europe, rather than in the Middle East,” says Prof. Israel Hershkovitz, a physical anthropologist at Tel Aviv University who led the analysis of the skull.

The partial skull, including most of the parietal bones and the lower jaw, was found during a 2010-2011 salvage dig at a prehistoric site discovered in the limestone quarry used by the Nesher cement factory. The site is just outside the central Israeli town of Ramla.

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