A few outlets, chiefly including the AP with its huge reach and the Jerusalem Post and with many other outlets following along from afar, have yet more news of old teeth of humans, or near-humans. A Tel Aviv University team believes that a few teeth it found in a cave near the Israeli community of Rosh Ha’ayin are up to 400,000 years old or so and look very much like they are from early Homo sapiens.

If that’s right, they are older than any such remains found in Africa, which is generally presumed to be where our species first arose. The implications are clear – either we all do date back to that African origin and the evidence just has not been found yet, or it may have been in Middle Eastern Eurasia somewhere.

It is hard from the first rush of news to find any extensive reporting, with info apparently nearly all from the discovery team. Thus there are general pronouncements on possible rewrites in store for the standard story of the evolution of modern humans, but not much on what other scholars think of the evidence. As this comes so shortly after news of another tooth, from more recent near human in Siberia, reporters who don’t put this news in context of that are doing no service to their readers.

Stories (so far):

• Jerusalem Post - Judy Siegel-Itzkovich: Homo sapiens lived in Eretz Yisrael 400,000 years ago ; Is it odd to use the historic term for the land of Israel, dating from before it was a state?  But the story does explicitly say right off that these remains long, long predate the  residence of Jews.
• AP – Daniel Estrin: Researchers: Ancient human remains found in Israel ; Right in the lede: “…could upset theories of the origin of humans.” That theory is pretty robust in general and flexible in detail – Australopithecines and then Homo, mostly in Africa, just us left. To “upset theory” implies something more fundamental than a geographic expansion of the homeland to the nearby Mideast, one thinks. It would appear more sensible to say this could force adjustment of the theory.
• Wired/Laelaps blog – Brian Switek: A Fistful of Teeth – Do the Qesem Cave Fossils Really change Our Understanding of Human Evolution? Hallelujah. Switek, being a paleontology specialist, applied his skeptical expertise. He also provides his own roundup of some of the initial and unmoored coverage of this news. He read the actual paper and reports that its conclusions provide little to merit the sensational coverage this is receiving. It’s not even sure that there teeth are not from a Neanderthal or closely related population. But the angle of rewriting evolution is too good for other reporters to pass up. Back to that, below.
• Adelaide Now / Advertiser: Matthew Kalman: Can a tooth change our history of man? ;
• Pravda - Fossilised tooth changes human history ; Looks like rewrite, and a bold one: “…sends the history book of Homo sapiens out of the window.” Uh huh. One notes that Pravda has the story on a webpage also alerting us to the sudden popularity of southern Russia among aliens. UFOs all over the place.
• Catholic Online: New fossil discovery may change everything known on primitive man ; Yet, the very same story does quote an outside authority who says whether this is modern man is far from clear.
• Daily Mail (UK) Matthew Kalman: Did first humans come out of Middle East and not Africa? Israeli discovery forces scientists to re-examine evolution of modern man ; Fortunately, the Mail provides a map. This site is not so far from Ethiopia, where previous H. sap fossils of great age have been found. Interesting. Paradigms however may not be shaking yet.
• AFP – World’s oldest human remains claimed in Israel ;

*UPDATE – As seen in comments, and thank you to reader Michelle Sipics, Carl Zimmer at his The Loom blog has also waded into this news burst, baffled by its existence.

I can find no press release. Switek does provide in his story at Wired a link to the journal and the abstract – I had looked and been unable to locate it, so thank you very much. The abstract, at least, says or so much as hints nothing about upsetting the theory of human evolution.

- Charlie Petit

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