NESHER RAMLA HOMO, DISCOVERING A NEW HOMINID

Today, The Grandma has been talking by Meet with Joseph de Ca'th Lon, one of her closest friends.

 

Joseph loves Archaeology, and he has travelled to Israel to know more about the last discoveries that have been published in Science, talking about a Middle Pleistocene Homo from Nesher Ramla.

Nesher Ramla is an archaeological and palaeoanthropological site in southeastern Ramla, in the transition from the mountains of western Judea to the Mediterranean coastal plain, in central Israel. 

Nesher Ramla is located in a limestone quarry owned by the cement company Nesher Israel and has been investigated since 2010. The site is a one-meter-thick karst funnel filled with sediment that was discovered and secured by the Israel Antiquities Authority when it was planned to extract the rock.

The cavity was used in the period from about 160,000 to 120,000 years ago, mainly through stone tools, as a place of residence for groups of nomadic people. A study published in 2021 reported the discovery of fossils of hominins with pronounced archaic features, on the basis of which they were not assigned to either Neanderthals or early Homo sapiens, but were called Nesher-Ramla Homo.

More information: BBC

Complete qualitative and quantitative analyses of the parietal bones, jaw, and lower second molar revealed that this Homo group exhibits a distinctive combination of archaic and Neanderthal features. The discoverers believe that these specimens represent the last survivors of a Levantine Middle Pleistocene paleodema that was probably involved in the evolution of Middle Pleistocene Homo in Europe and Asia.

Nesher Ramla Homo was an efficient hunter of large and small game, used firewood as fuel, cooked or roasted meat, and kept campfires.

These findings provide archaeological support for the characterization of cultural interactions between different human lineages during the Middle Palaeolithic, and suggest that the mixture between Middle Pleistocene Homo and archaic Homo sapiens had already occurred at that time.

Lithic analysis reveals that this Homo dominated stone tool production technologies previously known only to Homo sapiens and Neanderthals. The Levallois stone carving methods they used are indistinguishable from those of Homo sapiens of their time. The most likely explanation for such a close similarity is the cultural interactions between these two populations.

More information: Sci-News

I kept an open mind on the question
of whether a hominid had been present
in Europe in the early Pleistocene.

Louis Leakey