A newly discovered partial skull in Manot Cave in Israel's West Galilee suggested that early humans mated at some point with Neanderthals in Israel around 55,000 years ago.
Modern Europeans have inherited about 4 percent of their genes from Neanderthals, meaning the two groups mated at some point in the past.
The finding challenged the previous hypothesis that the two species potentially met 45,000 years ago somewhere in Europe.
The finding of Neanderthals living at other Levantine sites in the eastern Mediterranean region places the two species in the same area at about the same time. The Manot cave is located in the region where Neanderthals periodically lived, perhaps when ice sheets in Europe forced them to migrate to warmer locales, like the Levant region.
The partial cranium, covered in a patina of minerals produced by the wet conditions within the cave, allowed Miryam Bar-Matthews, Avner Ayalon and Gal Yas'ur from the Geological Survey of Israel to use uranium-thorium dating techniques and determine that the skull was between 50,000 to 60,000 years old.
According to Mark Hans the fossil's gender was unknown because it's missing the brow ridge, one marker for gender differences, but because the skull was from an adult, CWRU researchers know it was not related to other sub-adult human teeth and bones also found in the cave.
The study is published in Nature.
