When Prof. Mina Weinstein-Evron and Dr. Israel Hershkovitz began digging around a cave in the Mt. Carmel region 16 years ago, their intention was nothing less than to find the origins of the modern homo sapiens. In a paper published this week in Science, the pair makes the case that they may have come close to doing just that.
During that dig in 2002, a freshman on his first archaeological dig stumbled upon a human jawbone; in the years since, Weinstein-Evron and Herhskovitz have methodically used every manner of dating technology to ascertain the the age of the fragment, containing seven intact teeth and a cracked incisor. It has been to Tel Aviv, Austria, France, and Australia in order to be measured, turned over, and measured again. And the results, after quite a long wait, are in: The jawbone appears to be 177,000-194,000 years ago.
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