92,000-Year-Old Bones Rattle Neanderthal Evolution Theory

Early humans lived in what is now Israel nearly 100,000 years ago, a discovery showing that modern man existed in the Near East far earlier than previously thought and standing current evolutionary theory “on its head,” researchers reported Wednesday.

A group of archeologists reported in the British science journal Nature that Proto Cro-Magnon skeletons found in a cave near Nazareth date back about 92,000 years. Previous studies had placed the colonization of the Near East by Proto Cro-Magnon--or early modern man--at 40,000 years ago.

The discovery by Helene Valladas, of the French research agency CNRS, and colleagues in France and Israel apparently upsets many archeologists’ assumption that Neanderthals were closely related to modern humans. Neanderthal remains dating back about 60,000 years have been found in Israel.

“The evidence has now come in, and the minority view has been vindicated in a most startling fashion . . . These dates indicate thatsome modern Homo sapiens preceded Neanderthals in the area, standing the conventional evolutionary sequence on its head,” Chris Stringer, of the British Museum of Natural History, said in a separate article in the journal.

Anthropologists and other scientists have been debating whether Neanderthals were ancestors to modern humans, to modern European humans only, or if they were a separate branch that became extinct as the human branch continued to evolve.