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. at
Mount Carmel, Israel 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 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 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. 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." with the Skhul and Qafzeh hominins. In 1957, Howell redated all of these sites to the Early Last Pluvial, making them contemporaneous with classic Neanderthals. He further argued that there is no evidence that Skhul is contemporaneous with Tabun. He envisioned a lineage descending from the population represented by the Tunisian
Tighennif jaw (from the
Great Interglacial) going through a "sapiensization" event during the Last Interglacial, which led to Skhul and Qafzeh, and eventually Cro-Magnons. Concurrently, the population represented by the German
Swanscombe and Steinheim skulls (also from the Great Interglacial) led to early Neanderthals in the Last Interglacials, which persisted in the Near East (Tabun) as well as Eastern and Central Europe, but underwent "Neanderthalization" in Southern and Western Europe. Howell's association of Qafzeh with Skhul was largely unpopular until Qafzeh was better excavated and studied by Piveteau and Perrot from 1965 to 1979. Skhul and Qazfeh, thus, represented an early dispersal of modern humans
out of Africa beginning maybe at the start of the Late Pleistocene roughly 120,000 years ago. Modern humans were later replaced by Neanderthals, until a second modern human dispersal from Africa roughly 70,000 years ago. This dispersal would then go on to colonize the rest of the world. In 2018, modern human fossils from
Misliya Cave (also around Mount Carmel) were dated to 177,000 years ago, which could indicate modern human populations fluctuated in and out of the Levant several times (maybe in response to environmental stressors), possibly even before 200,000 years ago. In 2000, a Neanderthal (C1) from Tabun was estimated to be about 122,000 years old, and in 2005, a set of seven Neanderthal teeth from Tabun were dated to around 90,000 years ago. These dates open the possibility that modern humans from Skhul and Qafzeh and Neanderthals from Tabun inhabited the Levant at the same time. A 2021 phylogeny of some Middle and Late Pleistocene modern human fossils using
tip dating: ==Skhul==