The Apidima Cave skulls from Greece's Mani Peninsula are sparking major debate! Harvati's 2019 team classified Apidima 1 as early Homo sapiens at >210,000 years. De Lumley's team argues both skulls are pre-Neanderthals at ~160,000 years. Nearly no contextual layers survived around the bones.
Apidima Cave skulls fuel debate over early Homo sapiens in Europe over 210,000 years ago
GreeceBioarchaeology
Site mentioned
Key facts
- Apidima Cave is on the Mani Peninsula at the southern tip of the Peloponnese
- In the late 1970s, researchers identified human bone inside a block of breccia (cave rubble cemented into solid rock)
- Two skulls were eventually extracted from the same block: Apidima 1 (a back-of-skull portion) and Apidima 2 (more of the face with a crushed vault)
- Almost no sediment, stone tools, or contextual layers survived around either skull
- In 2019, Katerina Harvati and her team published in Nature: Apidima 2 placed on the Neanderthal line and dated to over 170,000 years; Apidima 1 classified as early Homo sapiens and dated to more than 210,000 years
- Marie-Antoinette de Lumley and her team published a competing study classifying both skulls as 'pre-Neanderthals' evolving locally from Homo erectus, dating them to about 160,000 years
- Critics note uranium-series dating becomes less reliable around 300,000 years because fossil bone leaks uranium over time
Sources
uni-tuebingen.de
Linked in video description
Apidima Caveen.wikipedia.org
Apidima Cave is a complex of five caves located on the western shore of Mani Peninsula in southern Greece. The partial crania of two hominins are attributed ...
Apidima Cave: a Pleiades place resourcepleiades.stoa.org
Apidima Cave is located on the western shore of the Mani Peninsula in southern Greece. Archaeological excavation in the cave system has ...
Apidima Caves: Their Significance for Human Evolution in ...uib.no
The Apidima cave complex, located on the coast of the Mani peninsula, is one of the most significant paleoanthropological sites in South-East ...
Oldest Known Homo Sapiens Outside Africa Found in Greecegreekreporter.com
In 1978, archaeologists excavating Apidima Cave on the Mani Peninsula of Greece discovered two significant fossils: a partial skull and a ...
Apidima Cave fossils provide earliest evidence of Homo ...pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
by K Harvati · 2019 · Cited by 474 — Two fossilized human crania (Apidima 1 and Apidima 2) from Apidima Cave, southern Greece, were discovered in the late 1970s but have remained enigmatic ...
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