The bones discovered in a cave are the oldest recently discovered human fossils in Europe. They suggest that ancient humans left Africa much earlier than previously thought.
The skull Apidima 2, which turned out to belong to the archaic human, was reconstructed. The Apidima 1 skull is older than its counterpart, which is also assumed to date back to the archaic human. However, scientists now believe it belongs to Homo sapiens.
The scientists said they found a part of a human skull on the surface of a cave in southern Greece and it is the oldest human fossil discovered in Europe ever.
To date, the oldest Homo sapiens fossils discovered in the continent date back to less than 45,000 years. The history of the incomplete skull discovered in Greece is four times that figure, dating back more than 210,000 years, the researchers wrote in the journal Nature.
The latest discovery is likely to change the written history of mankind's arrival in Europe and may lead to the revision of theories on the history of the entire human race.
Scientists say that the mankind emerged in Africa about 300,000 years ago. The new fossils emphasize the point of views saying the mankind migrated from Africa in several waves, from early times, according to our known history.
But the waves of early immigrants have completely disappeared. All humans of African descent today came in the late migration waves, some 70,000 years ago.
Katerina Harvati, the lead author of the study, said it was impossible to determine how long the first Europeans lived on the continent, or to identify the reasons behind their disappearance.
The first skulls appeared in 1978, when anthropologists at the University of Athens discovered a cave named Apidima on the Peloponnese peninsula in southern Greece, where they found the remains of a pair of skulls in the cave's roof.
The researchers were able to excavate a large rock that included fossils and tried for years to extract the bones from it. One of the fossils was called Apidima 1, which is part of the back of a skull, and the second piece, named Apidima 2, was composed of 66 fragments from a person's face.
A preliminary study on Apidima 2 indicated that the remains are 160,000 years old, so it is likely that Apidima 1 had been fossilized at about the same time.
