Apidima Cave

A skull found in the Apidima Cave, located in the Peloponnese, Greece, indicates that our human ancestors left Africa far earlier than anthropologists believed.

A study published in the Journal Nature reports that the skull, which was originally found in the 1970s in Greece, has now been analysed with the latest techniques and found to belong to a member of an early population of Homo Sapiens, which is around 210,000 years old.

A further skull that was also found in the cave belonged to a Neanderthal that dates back 170,000 years.

According to researchers, finding both skulls in the same cave suggests that numerous early migrations took place out of Africa, rather than a single event. This is the earliest evidence of modern humans found outside Africa.