The famous skull found in Petralona, close to Thessaloniki, Greece in a cave now known as "the Mausoleum", back in 1960. It was encrusted and cemented to the cave's wall with calcite, a mineral that precipitates from mineral-rich water in caves; it is known for shaping stalactites and stalagmites. Its age was unknown. But it was dated by C. Falguerès et al., (2025) who published a paper on it last September.
The paper reports how the team managed to date the skull: "the Petralona cranium has a minimum age of 286 ± 9 ka." This research also places it in our ancestral tree: "From a morphological point of view, the Petralona hominin forms part of a distinct and more primitive group than Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, and the new age estimate provides further support for the coexistence of this population alongside the evolving Neanderthal lineage in the later Middle Pleistocene of Europe."
The skull belongs to a more primitive group of hominins, older than Neanderthals and our species. The age of the sample shows that it coexisted with Neanderthals in Europe, alongside Neanderthals well into the Mid Pleistocene Period.
This finding is important because it shows that human evolution is more complex than imagined. There were different kinds of of humans alive, coexisting, across the globe 300 ky ago: Denisovans, Anatomically Modern Humans, Neanderthals, and now, Homo heidelbergensis, and probably more. They surely met, exchanged sex, and know-how, shaping our evolution.
Linar trees with a single Neanderthal - Human split in Africa 600 ky ago, and simple models with unique, singular admixture events as proposed by certain models don't seem to accurately reflect the population dynamics that was going on in the Old World (and who knows, perhaps also in America), 300,000 years ago.
In a future post we will look into the validity of these trees and their shortcomings according to statistician and geneticist Alan R. Templeton.
Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall ©
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