The discovery of a new skull shows that humanity could have arrived in Europe 150 000 years earlier than expected

MAccording to researchers, ankind may have arrived in Europe 150,000 years earlier than planned after reassessing an ancient skull discovered in a cave in Greece.

The skull was found in the cave in the 1970s and was identified as a Neanderthal. But new techniques have deepened the analysis of the skull and scientists were surprised to see that it was a skull of 210 000 years old and belonging to a Homo sapiens.

"This shows that the early dispersal of Homo sapiens out of Africa has not only occurred earlier – 200,000 years ago – but has expanded geographically until it reached the end of the 1980s. in Europe, "said Katerina Harvati, paleoanthropologist at the Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen, Germany.

"It's something we had not suspected before and that has implications for the population movements of these old groups."

The results corroborate the idea that Homo sapiens would have made several migrations from Africa, sometimes unsuccessfully, over the course of tens of thousands of years.