Ivan Semeniuk reports: Francesco Berna still remembers his first visit to Manot Cave, accidentally discovered in 2008 on a ridge in northern Israel. A narrow passage steeply descends into darkness. It then opens onto a 60-metre-long cavern with side chambers, all dramatically ornamented with stalactites and stalagmites.“It’s a spectacular cave,” said Dr. Berna, a geoarcheologist at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C. “It’s basically untouched.”

Now Manot Cave has yielded a tantalizing sign of humanity’s initial emergence out of Africa and a possible forerunner of the first modern humans in Europe, an international team of researchers that includes Dr. Berna said on Wednesday.

The find also establishes the Levant region (including Israel, Lebanon and part of Syria) as a plausible setting where our species interbred with its Neanderthal cousins.

The team’s key piece of evidence is a partial human skull found during the initial reconnaissance of the cave.

Based on its features and dimensions, the skull is unquestionably that of an anatomically modern human, the first such find in the region. The individual would probably have looked like the first Homo sapiens that appeared in Africa about 200,000 years ago and been physically indistinguishable from humans today.

“He or she would look very modern. With a tie on, you would not be able to tell the difference,” said Israel Hershkovitz, a biological anthropologist at Tel Aviv University and lead author of a paper published this week in the journal Nature that documents the Manot Cave find.

The age of the fossil is the crucial detail. The team’s analysis shows it is about 55,000 years old. That is more recent than the fragmentary remains of some not-so-modern-looking humans that drifted into the region at an earlier stage. But it coincides exactly with a period when a wetter climate may have opened the door to the first modern human migration out of Africa.

Fossils of modern humans that are only slightly less old than the Manot Cave skull have been found in the Czech Republic and Romania, making the new find a potential forerunner of the first Europeans. [Continue reading…]

Much of the reporting on these findings makes reference to “the first Europeans” and even though anthropologists might be clear about what they mean when they use to term Europe, they might consider avoiding using it, given the common meaning that is usually attached to the word.

Indeed, the lead researcher cited above, Israel Hershkovitz, illustrates the problem as he reinforces cultural stereotypes by implying that the human has fully evolved once he adorns the symbol of European, masculine power: a necktie. The irony is compounded by the fact that he and his team were trumpeting the significance of their discovery of a woman’s skull.

(No doubt many Europeans and others with European affectations have been disturbed this week to see Greece’s new prime minister, in the birthplace of democracy, assuming power without a necktie.)

The Oxford archeologist, Barry Cunliffe, has referred to the region of land that recently got dubbed “Europe” as “the westerly excrescence of the continent of Asia.”

Europeans might object to the suggestion that they inhabit an excrescence — especially since the terms suggests an abnormality — but in terms of continental topography, it points to Europe’s unique feature: its eastern boundaries have always been elastic and somewhat arbitrary.

More importantly, when it comes to human evolution, to frame this in terms of the advance into Europe revives so many echoes of nineteenth century racism.

It cannot be overstated that the first Europeans were not European.

Europe is an idea that has only been around for a few hundred years during which time it has been under constant revision.

Migration is also a misleading term since it evokes images of migrants: people who travel vast distances to inhabit new lands.

Human dispersal most likely involved rather short hops, one generation at a time, interspersed with occasional actual migrations driven by events like floods or famine.