Masters of the Planet (32 page)

Now let's shift the scene to the nearby Levant, the area along the eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea that would have been the first stop along the route followed by hominids leaving Africa and spreading north and west. Because the Levant has typically shared elements of its fauna with Africa rather than with regions to its north, biogeographers have actually often considered this area an extension of the great African landmass. Following Omo/Herto times we have a growing inventory of African fossil hominid crania that unequivocally show the distinctive modern
Homo sapiens
morphology; but none of them is indisputably as early as a more or less complete skeleton that was buried, by the latest reckoning 100 thousand years ago or more, at the Israeli cave site of Jebel Qafzeh. This specimen clearly represents a member of our own species, as do the remains of an adolescent found nearby. Yet at the same site we also find—in larger numbers—the remains of big-brained hominids who are not your standard-issue
Homo sapiens,
although they are certainly not Neanderthals. To deepen the mystery, all of these hominids were found in association with Mousterian stone tool kits. These tools were more or less identical to those produced by the Neanderthals whose presence is well documented in Israel at around the same time. Indeed, Neanderthal sites in the region date from at least 160 thousand years ago to about 45 thousand years
ago.

The earliest modern human fossil known from outside Africa, this skull was found at the Israeli site of Jebel Qafzeh. Known as Qafzeh 9, it is anatomically a standard modern human. However, other hominid fossils from the same site do not have typically modern skull anatomy, and all the Qafzeh hominids are associated with a Mousterian industry similar to made by Neanderthals in the same region. Drawing by Don McGranaghan.

The Qafzeh hominids are often spoken of in the same breath as those from the rock shelter of Mugharet-es-Skh
l, a burial locality a few dozen miles away on the western slope of Mount Carmel, overlooking the Mediterranean. Excavations at Skh
l produced the remains of ten adults and juveniles, probably around 100 thousand years old. These fossils present a more uniform physical aspect than those from Qafzeh, but they are no less odd for that. Like modern humans they have high, rounded cranial vaults that held impressively large brains of some 1,450 to 1,590 cc; but, unlike ours, the fairly heavily built faces of the Skh
l hominids were unretracted, jutting proudly afore the vault and topped by a transverse bar of bone instead of a vertical forehead. The scientists who described these fossils before World War II were perplexed by this curious morphology, to such an extent that although they wrote a very large volume on the subject, what they actually concluded, if anything, about the identity of the Skh
l hominids remained spectacularly
obscure
.

Cranium V from the site of Skh
l, in Israel. Now thought to be well over 100 thousand years old, the Skh
l fossils have for long been assigned to
Homo sapiens,
but they are actually quite distinctive in morphology. Drawing by Don McGranaghan.

One possibility, of course, was that they represented a hybrid population between moderns and Neanderthals. Geographically this would make sense, for the Skh
l locality is only a few minutes' easy stroll from the cave of Tab
n, long occupied by Neanderthals. Indeed, Neanderthals seem to have been in residence there close to the time that the Skh
l burials were made, although there is no independent reason to believe that they were around at exactly the same moment. Biologically, though, the story is rather different: Neanderthals and moderns were built on a fundamentally different plan; and although we really have no idea at all what a modern/Neanderthal hybrid
should
look like, we do know that hybrids tend to exhibit traits of both parental populations. And this is certainly not what we are seeing at Skh
l.