Jaw fossil discovered in Israel looks human, but it’s much older than it should be

This new find adds another important clue towards solving the mystery of this earlier spread of humans out of Africa, write the authors of a commentary published with the study. “I think that’s pretty cool,” agrees John Hawks, an paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “You have a modern-looking upper jaw in Israel that was there much earlier than it was supposed to have been.” He cautions, however, against getting too attached to the label Homo sapiens: with only a small chunk of bone to go on, it’s hard to say for certain. It’s possible that it could be from another, unnamed relative of modern day people, for example.