Apidima Cave Skull: Homo sapiens in Greece 210,000 Years Ago?

The Apidima Cave skull, known as Apidima 1, is a partial human cranium from a sea cave on the Mani peninsula of southern Greece. In 2019 an international team argued that it belonged to Homo sapiens and was at least 210,000 years old, which would make it the oldest known fossil of our species outside Africa. The claim challenged the usual story of when modern humans first reached Europe, and it remains one of the most debated finds in recent palaeoanthropology.

The caves and the 1978 discovery

The Apidima caves are a small group of caves cut into the limestone cliffs of the western Mani coast, in the southern Peloponnese. Several can be reached only from the sea. In the 1970s and 1980s they were explored by a team from the University of Athens led by the anthropologist Theodoros Pitsios.

In 1978 the team found two human skulls embedded in a block of breccia, a hard mass of cemented sediment and rock, in one of the caves. The more complete specimen, Apidima 2, preserves much of the face and brow. The other, Apidima 1, consists only of the rear and side of the braincase. Freeing them from the rock was slow, and Apidima 2 in particular is distorted.

For decades both skulls were generally described as Neanderthals or as archaic humans related to Neanderthals. They received relatively little international attention.

The 2019 study

In July 2019 a team led by Katerina Harvati of the University of Tübingen published a new analysis in Nature. The researchers made CT scans of both skulls, digitally reconstructed the missing and distorted parts, and compared their shapes with a wide sample of Neanderthals, early and recent modern humans, and older species.

They concluded that Apidima 2 was indeed Neanderthal-like. Apidima 1, however, had a rounded back to the skull and lacked the bulge known as an occipital “bun” or “chignon”, a classic Neanderthal feature. On that basis they assigned it to early Homo sapiens.

Uranium-series dating by Rainer Grün and colleagues gave minimum ages of about 210,000 years for Apidima 1 and about 170,000 years for Apidima 2. If correct, the two skulls were not contemporaries, even though they were found in the same block of breccia. The team argued that the breccia had formed in stages, mixing material of different ages.

The controversy

The claim attracted wide coverage and immediate criticism. Opponents raised three main objections.

First, Apidima 1 is a fragment. Without the face, brow or jaw, many specialists doubt that the back of a skull can reliably separate early Homo sapiens from other humans of the period, whose features overlapped. Second, the reconstruction of a damaged fossil involves judgement, and different reconstructions can give different results. Third, the dating is complex: the two skulls came from the same rock, yet were dated some 40,000 years apart, and only minimum ages were obtained.

Some researchers who examined the fossils argued that both belong to the same Neanderthal-related population. The authors of the 2019 study defended their interpretation, and the question remains open. Further finds from the region will probably be needed to settle it.

Apidima and early dispersals out of Africa

The Apidima claim did not arise in isolation. In 2018 researchers reported a modern-looking upper jaw from Misliya Cave in Israel, dated to between about 194,000 and 177,000 years ago. Fossils from Skhul and Qafzeh, also in Israel, show that Homo sapiens lived in the Levant by about 120,000 to 90,000 years ago.

Together these finds suggest that modern humans left Africa several times, long before the main dispersal of about 60,000 to 50,000 years ago that led to the spread of Homo sapiens across Eurasia. If Apidima 1 is accepted, one of these early groups reached south-eastern Europe. It evidently did not last: by about 170,000 years ago the same cave held Neanderthals, who went on to occupy Europe until roughly 40,000 years ago. The early group may have died out, been absorbed, or retreated, and some genetic studies suggest early interbreeding between Neanderthals and very early modern humans.

Timeline

• c. 210,000 years ago (minimum): The individual known as Apidima 1 dies and is later sealed in cave breccia.
• c. 170,000 years ago (minimum): The Neanderthal-like Apidima 2 is incorporated in the same breccia.
• 1978: Theodoros Pitsios’s University of Athens team finds both skulls in a cave on the Mani coast.
• 2018: The Misliya jaw from Israel is reported as an early Homo sapiens outside Africa.
• 2019, July: Katerina Harvati’s team publishes the claim that Apidima 1 is early Homo sapiens.
• 2019 onwards: Other researchers dispute the identification and the dating.

Why it matters

Apidima 1 is at the centre of a debate about how early, and how often, our species ventured beyond Africa. Whether or not the identification holds, the controversy shows how much can depend on a single damaged fossil, and why researchers treat bold claims about human origins with caution until more evidence appears. For the longer European story, see the Neanderthals.