The Skhul and Qafzeh hominins or Qafzeh–Skhul early modern humans are hominin fossils discovered in Es-Skhul and Qafzeh caves in Israel. They are today classified as Homo sapiens, among the earliest of their species in Eurasia. Skhul Cave is on the slopes of Mount Carmel; Qafzeh Cave is a rockshelter near Nazareth in Lower Galilee.
The remains found at Es Skhul, together with those found at the Nahal Me'arot Nature Reserve and Mugharet el-Zuttiyeh, were classified in 1939 by Arthur Keith and Theodore D. McCown as Palaeoanthropus palestinensis, a descendant of Homo heidelbergensis.The Palaeolithic Origins of Human Burial, Paul Pettitt, 2013, p. 59Human Adaptation in the Asian Palaeolithic: Hominin Dispersal and Behaviour during the Late Quaternary, Ryan J. Rabett, 2012, p. 90The Stone Age of Mount Carmel: report of the Joint Expedition of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem and the American School of Prehistoric Research, 1929–1934, p. 18
Research history Discovery In 1928, Mandatory Palestine planned to mine the cliffs of Nahal Me'arot (a valley in the Carmel mountain range) for construction of a deep-water harbour in the city of Haifa roughly north. The Department of Antiquities, already suspecting the archaeological value of the many openly visible caves in the area, sent the assistant director — C. Lambert — on a three-week trial excavation of El Wad in November. Lambert discovered several stone tools, quern-stones, beads, stone constructions, and human fossils, as well as the first published discovery of Near Eastern Stone Age art (an animal-shaped bone sickle). The British School of Archaeology at Jerusalem partnered with the American School of Prehistoric Research (ASPR) to fund seven field seasons from 1929 to 1934 of the region's caves under the direction of British archaeologist Dorothy Garrod.
She invited American archaeologist to excavate Skhul Cave, who joined as a field representative of the ASPR as part of his graduate program with University of California, Berkeley. On 3 May 1931, McCown unearthed a fossil child skeleton (Skhul I); and on 30 April 1932 (with his assistant Hallam L. Movius), he discovered another skeleton (Skhul II), a partial skull and jaw (Skhul III), and a nearly complete skeleton (Skhul IV). On 3 May 1932, McCown and Movius discovered another nearly complete skeleton (Skhul V), and a partial skeleton (Skhul VI). McCown found another partial skull (Skhul VII) and child skeleton (Skhul VIII) on 13 May, a partial skeleton (Skhul IX) on 19 May, and an infant skeleton (Skhul X) while studying the material in 1935.
The full excavation history of the site, archaeological finds, palaeoenvironmental studies, and anatomical description of the fossil material was published in a two-volume monograph in 1937; volume 1 published by Garrod and Welsh palaeontologist Dorothea Bate, and volume 2 by McCown and British anatomist Sir Arthur Keith. The skeletons were removed from stone matrices principally under the direction of McCown at the Royal College of Surgeons of England over the course of three years, aided by his assistants Margot Collett and W. C. Willmott. Keith and McCown were able to study the material at the Buckston Browne Research Farm, and afterwards they repatriated the material back to Mandatory Palestine. The material from Skhul Cave, as well as the nearby Tabun Cave, represented one of the most complete samples of the human fossil record at the time.
In 1951, American anthropologist Francis Clark Howell recognised the similarities between the Skhul remains and human fossils exhumed about east from Qafzeh Cave by French consulate René Neuville beginning in 1934. The connection was initially unpopular because the Qafzeh material was unpublished and the stratigraphy and age were uncertain. In 1963, the Israeli ambassador to France, Walter Eytan, suggested to French palaeontologist Jean Piveteau to continue excavation of Qafzeh, which recommenced under Piveteau and his student Jean Perrot in July 1965. Their work cemented the connection between Skhul and Qafzeh.
Age and stratigraphy In 1937, Garrod and Bate divided the thick reddish-brown breccia of Skhul Cave into three layers: the Layer A yielding pottery fragments and Middle to Upper Palaeolithic artefacts; the Layer B yielding at least 10 fossil individuals and around 9,800 stone tools; and the Layer C yielding some stone tools of the same culture as Layer B. They concluded that Skhul Layers B and C are roughly contemporaneous with the Neanderthal fossils of Tabun Cave Layers B and C, and date to the Riss-Würm interglacial (the Middle Pleistocene) based on the animal remains (biostratigraphy). Layer B of Tabun lacks wild cattle and instead has a preponderance of gazelle, unlike the older Tabun C as well as Skhul B, so Garrod and Bate suggested that Tabun B was deposited in a younger, dryer period than Skhul B (presuming wild cattle require wetter conditions). That is, the Skhul B material which better resembles modern humans was older than the Tabun B material which better resembles Neanderthals.
In 1957, Howell asserted that the Skhul and Tabun material must date to the Early Last Pluvial (the early Last Glacial Period during the Late Pleistocene). In 1961, British archaeologist Eric Sidney Higgs rejected Garrod and Bates' arguments for Skhul B dating to a wetter period older than Tabun B, suggesting Skhul B might actually be from a dry period younger than Tabun B. In general, most workers opted to date the Neanderthals of the region (Tabun, Amud, Kebara) to about 50,000 years ago, and the modern humans of Skhul and Qafzeh to 40,000 years ago.
In 1988, French palaeontologist Hélène Valladas and colleagues dated stone tools from Qafzeh using thermoluminescence dating to about 90,000–100,000 years ago (at the time, nearly as old as some of the oldest modern human fossils from Africa). In 1989, British physical anthropologist Chris Stringer and colleagues used electron spin resonance dating of bovine teeth at Skhul to date the human fossils to roughly 80,000–100,000 years ago. This meant that modern humans quickly dispersed from Africa soon after evolution, but did not penetrate Europe for tens thousands of years. Further, Skhul and Qafzeh were older than Tabun and other Neanderthal sites, implying that modern humans were replaced by Neanderthals.
Classification Early racial classifications
McCown and Keith noted that the Tabun material more closely resembled Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis), while the Skhul material better resembled later Cro-Magnons (modern humans, H. sapiens). Nonetheless, they opted to recognise the Tabun and Skhul populations as belonging to the same highly variable species based on cultural and dental similarity, and because they were thought to be contemporaries at the time. They also grouped Keith's 1925 Galilee Man discovered away into this group, on the Tabun end of variation. They believed the population was closely related to the last common ancestor of Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons, "in the throes of an evolutionary transition," envisioning a geographic grade ranging from the "evolutionary backwater" of Western Europe with the "Palaeoanthropic" (less evolved) classic Neanderthals, to the "Neanthropic" (more evolved) Near East. In their model, human populations became progressively more evolutionarily advanced from Western Europe towards the Near East, with the homeland of what they considered the most-evolved Caucasian race lying still farther east in Asia. They concluded that migration by Caucasian populations from the Near East had advanced the population of Europe during the Palaeolithic, drawing a comparison with the later migration of Near Eastern farmers into Neolithic Europe.
McCown and Keith opted to classify the Tabun and Skhul remains as a new species, "Palaeoanthropus palestinensis". The genus "Palaeoanthropus" was erected in 1909 by Italian palaeontologist to house the substantially older German Mauer 1 (originally Homo heidelbergensis). They retained "P. heidelbergensis" as the earliest member of this evolutionary lineage. The other species they designated (from west to east) are: "P. neanderthalensis" (specifically the French La Chappelle-aux-Saints 1 and Western German Neanderthal 1), the Central German "P. ehringsdorfiensis", and the Croatian "P. krapinensis", with "P. krapinensis" as the closest relative of "P. palestinensis", serving to, "bridge the gap between the ancient Palestinians and the Neanderthalians of western Europe." They noted that the Middle Pleistocene German Steinheim skull, which they considered to be the earliest known Neanderthal type in Europe, has more in common with the Tabun and Skhul material than with European Neanderthals.
Modern evolutionary synthesis In the 1940s, the formulation of modern evolutionary synthesis and the burgeoning field of population genetics shifted the popular interpretations of fossil populations and the definition of "species" in palaeontology. Notably, Jewish-German anatomist Franz Weidenreich and Russian-American geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky argued that only one widespread species of human should be recognised as existing at any one point in time, which can be subdivided into geographic subspecies or races.
In 1944, Dobzhansky stated that it was more probable that the Tabun and Skhul material are the result of interbreeding between archaic and modern humans, which should naturally occur (in this case quite frequently) when "Neanderthaliens" (Tabun) and H. sapiens (Skhul) are in proximity. He further said that the lack of reproductive isolation between Neanderthals and modern humans demonstrated by Tabun and Skhul is proof that they are different races of the same species, exclaiming, "This shows how rash are the assertions of some writers that in fossil forms evidence on presence or absence of reproductive isolation can never be obtained!"
Similarly, in 1950, German-American evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, surveying a "bewildering diversity of names", subsumed human fossils into three species of Homo: "H. transvaalensis" (the australopithecines), H. erectus, and H. sapiens — with each species directly evolving into the next with no overlap (chronospecies). He justified sinking Neanderthals into a subspecies of H. sapiens as H. s. neanderthalensis using the Skhul and Tabun material, commenting, "The fact remains that Mt. Carmel man makes the delimitation of modern man from Neanderthal exceedingly difficult, if not impossible."
Subsequently, many authors favoured recognising a Neanderthal phase in human evolution, which would terminate with anatomically modern humans and classic Neanderthals. In 1951, Howell distinguished classic Neanderthals of the Würm glaciation from "early Neanderthals" of the Riss-Würm interglacial, which he placed as the ancestral stock of both classic Neanderthals and modern humans. He included Skhul and Tabun as a Southwest Asian variety of early Neanderthal — a population ancestral to modern humans, as opposed to a hybrid population. He also considered the reach of that specific population represented at Mount Carmel to Galilee Man, the Uzbekistani Teshik-Tash 1, and the (at the time undescribed) material of Qafzeh Cave.