From Chapter 11 – The Real Story of Us. © 2020 by Emory Lynn.
As historic as the Holy Land is for Jews, Christians and Muslims, its historical importance to all mankind greatly predates that of the Abrahamic religions. The Holy Land lies on a corridor connecting three continents. It’s the only land-based route out of Africa to Asia and Europe, and according to paleoanthropologists and population geneticists, it was out of Africa that our ancestors emigrated, long before there was a “Holy” Land. The authors of the books of the Bible had no idea that evidence of hundreds of thousands of years of early human ancestry was all around them.
Kebara Cave in northwestern Israel is the site of a treasure trove of hominin fossils and artifacts. A nearly complete skeleton of a 60,000 year-old Neanderthal was unearthed there in 1983 that included the first hominin hyoid bone ever discovered. The hyoid, which helps enable complex speech in humans, is a small U-shaped bone. It’s the only bone in the body that isn’t connected to any other bone. Located between the larynx and the base of the tongue, it connects the musculature of the larynx, tongue and jaw. The Neanderthal hyoid bone discovered is almost identical to that of a modern human. Today’s non-human primates have a much larger and more robust hyoid bone, which inhibits their ability to make refined sounds. This fossil discovery, combined with the recent discovery that Neanderthals carried a very similar variant of the FOX2P gene that is important for speech in modern humans, is significant evidence that Neanderthals had the physiology necessary for speech comparable to ours.
Kebara Cave is near Mt. Carmel, which is noteworthy in the Bible as the place where prophet Elijah of Israel’s northern kingdom confronted the prophets of the pagan god Baal. The writer of that 1 Kings story almost certainly believed in a historical Adam and Eve while being completely unaware of the evidence of human evolution in the northern kingdom.
Another very important discovery was recently made on the west slope of Mt. Carmel.25 In 2018, after many years of careful analysis, it was announced that an anatomically modern H. sapiens upper jawbone with eight teeth was found in Misliya Cave, along with sophisticated stone tools. The fossils were carbon-dated to between 177–194,000 years old. The implication is that at least some anatomically modern humans exited Africa much sooner than originally thought. This provides additional evidence that there were multiple exoduses from Africa over nearly 200,000 years, though the earliest probably did not survive to contribute to the genetic makeup of future world populations.
The oldest known evidence of social organization, communication, divided working and living spaces and, at the time of its discovery, the oldest evidence for the controlled use of fire by early humans were found at the Gesher Benot Ya’aqov archeological site in northern Israel.26 Around 750–800,000 years ago, for an extended period, early hunter-gatherers were settled in the area (probably Homo erectus although skeletal remains have not been found). Researchers have unearthed artifacts such as hand axes, chopping tools, scrapers, hammers and awls plus animal bones and botanical remains buried in distinct areas. The inhabitants processed fish and cooked over fires that were arranged in a manner suggestive of hearths. Fish bones and burned nuts were discovered with the fireplaces. (According to a 1-12-10 National Geographic Daily News article, “A visitor stumbling upon the Gesher Benot Ya’aqov encampment might have found women gathering nuts and processing small animals like fish, crabs, and turtles close to the communal hearth … The men would be off hunting or situated in farther corners of the site butchering larger game …”) The use of fire at the encampment is of special interest to scientists because of the possible connection between cooked food, energy consumption and evolution of a large brain.
The first hominin fossil ever discovered in Western Asia27 came from Zuttiyeh Cave, Israel (1925). It was a 200–300,000 year-old cranium that appears to be intermediate to early Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, based on measurement analysis of key features. The estimated date puts the specimen in the time period when early H. sapiens and Neanderthals are known to have first coexisted. This fossil, a part of the so-called “Galilee Man,” was discovered about 2.2 miles from the northwest edge of the Sea of Galilee. The Sea of Galilee is legendary for many events described in the New Testament: Jesus recruited disciples on its shore, walked on its waters, calmed a storm there, fed 5,000 people by its shore with five loaves of bread and two fish, and it was there that the disciples hauled in an overflow of fish when the resurrected Jesus told them where to cast their net.
Galilee and other parts of the Holy Land aren’t well known by the public for the history they hold of our ancient brethren who lived long before Adam and Eve, the Noachian flood, the Jewish patriarchs and Jesus. Had our ancestors not used the Sinai Peninsula and south Red Sea corridors to leave Africa to populate the rest of the world when they did, the size and makeup of the world’s population would likely be significantly different now. Readers today would not have learned about Adam, Eve and the fall of man in a book called Genesis. We would have been raised on some other religious myths about early human history that science would have likewise dismantled.
Notes:
25. Israel Hershkovitz et al., The Earliest Modern Humans Outside Africa, (Science,Vol. 359, Issue 6374, 1-26-18), pp 456-459.
26. Information from National Geographic Daily News, Homo Erectus Invented Modern Living?, 1-13-10, http:/news.nationalgeographic. com/news/2010/01/100112-modern-human-behavior. Accessed 8-12-18. Also see John Hawks, The Rise of Humans: Great Scientific Debates, The Great Courses, Lecture 12, 2011.
27. Western Asia as now defined includes Israel, occupied Palestinian Territory, Lebanon, Jordan, Cyprus, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, United Arab Republic, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia.
