Rosa Rubicondior: Creationism Refuted - Neanderthals And Modern Humans Interbreeding in Israel

Friday, 22 August 2025

Creationism Refuted - Neanderthals And Modern Humans Interbreeding in Israel - 130,000 Years Before Creation Week

AI reconstruction of mixed Neanderthal-Homo sapiens family (enhanced).

Earliest Evidence of Neanderthal–Homo sapiens Interbreeding Found in Israel | Tel Aviv University | Tel Aviv University

Another day, another paper refuting creationism and the Bible narrative.

Creationism suffered yet another body blow a few days ago with the announcement that a Tel Aviv University (TAU)-led international team has concluded that 140,000-year-old fossilised remains of a child, found 90 years ago in the Skhūl Cave on Mount Carmel, show unmistakable evidence of being a hybrid between a modern Homo sapiens and a Neanderthal.

Whether this news will penetrate the impervious defences of creationists — who resemble a brain-dead boxer long since counted out, the crowd gone home, yet still convinced he is winning — remains to be seen.

Not only does this timeline, which places anatomically modern humans outside Africa living alongside another hominin species, utterly contradict the Bible’s creation myth, but so does the very fact that there were multiple hominin species at all. The problem for Bible literalists is not just the incompatibility of dates, but the clear evidence of human evolution and divergence — evidence that rules out the notion of a single ancestral couple committing an “original sin” that supposedly condemns all their descendants to seek “salvation” from the wrath of an eternally unforgiving creator god.

To make matters worse for creationism, this fossil was found in the very region that later became central to the Bronze Age mythology of the Bible.

From a scientific perspective, this discovery — confirming what has long been suspected — shows that there were several earlier, ultimately unsuccessful migrations of H. sapiens out of Africa. During these early dispersals, modern humans met and interbred with Neanderthals, introducing *H. sapiens

DNA into Neanderthal populations long before the successful migration around 60,000–40,000 years ago, when further interbreeding occurred.

The Skhūl Cave. The Skhūl Cave (sometimes written Es-Skhūl Cave) is part of the Nahal Me’arot / Wadi el-Mughara complex on Mount Carmel, Israel, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Along with the neighbouring Tabun, Jamal and El Wad caves, it has yielded some of the most important hominin fossils in the Levant. Here’s what is known about Skhūl Cave and how the fossils there — including the famous “Skhūl child” — were dated:

The Site

Location: Skhūl Cave lies in Mount Carmel, near Haifa, Israel.
Archaeological importance: It has produced fossils of at least 10 individuals, along with Mousterian stone tools typically associated with Neanderthals.
Hominin significance: The Skhūl remains, discovered in the 1920s–30s by Dorothy Garrod’s team, represent some of the earliest *Homo sapiens
fossils found outside Africa. They are also crucial because they show a mixture of modern human and archaic/Neanderthal features, leading to debates about whether they were early moderns, hybrids, or part of a population that interbred with Neanderthals.

The Fossils

The most famous is the “Skhūl V” skull, often cited as one of the earliest anatomically modern human crania outside Africa.
The remains show traits such as a modern cranial vault but robust facial features, strong brow ridges, and other archaic characteristics.
The child’s remains (the subject of this article) appear to confirm the hybridisation hypothesis.

Dating

The dating of Skhūl Cave fossils has been refined over the years with improved methods. Key points:

Early excavations (1930s–1960s): Initial estimates placed the fossils at 40,000–50,000 years old, partly because they were associated with Mousterian tools, usually linked to Neanderthals.
Later revisions (1980s–1990s): Uranium-series dating of associated flowstones and electron spin resonance (ESR) dating of teeth pushed the ages back significantly.

These methods gave ages in the range of 100,000–135,000 years.
This aligned them with interglacial periods when humans could have dispersed out of Africa via the Levant.

Current consensus:

The Skhūl fossils are generally accepted as ~120,000–140,000 years old.
This places them in the last interglacial (Marine Isotope Stage 5), consistent with other early modern human finds in the Levant (e.g., Qafzeh Cave).
The new Tel Aviv University-led study seems to support and refine this chronology, especially in the case of the child’s remains.

Why It Matters

The dating of Skhūl shows that Homo sapiens were present in the Levant much earlier than the “successful” migration around 60,000–40,000 years ago. It means:

There were multiple waves of early humans leaving Africa.
Some of these populations interbred with Neanderthals before going extinct.
Neanderthals therefore carried H. sapiens DNA even before the later, larger migrations of modern humans.

The discovery is the subject of a recent paper in L’Anthropologie and a news release from Tel Aviv University.

Earliest Evidence of Neanderthal–Homo sapiens Interbreeding Found in Israel
A TAU-led international study reveals the world’s oldest human fossil showing traits of both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens — a five-year-old child who lived 140,000 years ago in Mount Carmel’s Skhūl Cave.
An international study led by researchers from Tel Aviv University and the French National Centre for Scientific Research provides the first scientific evidence that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens had biological and social relations, and even interbred for the first time, in the Land of Israel. The research team identified combination of Neanderthal and Homo sapiens traits in the skeleton of a five-year-old child discovered about 90 years ago in the Skhūl Cave on Mount Carmel. The fossil, estimated to be about 140,000 years old, is the earliest human fossil in the world to display features of both groups, which until recently were considered two separate species.

A Window into Human Evolution

The study was led by Prof. Israel Hershkovitz of the Gray Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences at Tel Aviv University and Anne Dambricourt-Malassé of the French National Centre for Scientific Research. The findings of this historic discovery were published in the journal l’Anthropologie.

Genetic studies over the past decade have shown that these two groups exchanged genes. Even today, 40,000 years after the last Neanderthals disappeared, part of our genome—2 to 6 percent—is of Neanderthal origin. But these gene exchanges took place much later, between 60,000 to 40,000 years ago. Here, we are dealing with a human fossil that is 140,000 years old. In our study, we show that the child’s skull, which in its overall shape resembles that of Homo sapiens—especially in the curvature of the skull vault—has an intracranial blood supply system, a lower jaw, and an inner ear structure typical of Neanderthals.

Professor Israël Hershkovitz, lead author.
Department of Anatomy and Anthropology
Dan-David Center for Human Evolution and Biohistory Research
Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences
Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel.,

The skull of Skhūl I child showing cranial curvature typical of Homo sapiens

Rewriting the Timeline

For years, Neanderthals were thought to be a group that evolved in Europe, migrating to the Land of Israel only about 70,000 years ago, following the advance of European glaciers. In a groundbreaking 2021 study published in the prestigious journal Science, Prof. Hershkovitz and his colleagues showed that early Neanderthals lived in the Land of Israel as early as 400,000 years ago. This human type, which Prof. Hershkovitz called “Nesher Ramla Homo” (after the archaeological site near the Nesher Ramla factory where it was found), encountered Homo sapiens groups that began leaving Africa about 200,000 years ago—and, according to the current study’s findings, interbred with them. The child from the Skhūl Cave is the earliest fossil evidence in the world of the social and biological ties forged between these two populations over thousands of years. The local Neanderthals eventually disappeared when they were absorbed into the Homo sapiens population, much like the later European Neanderthals.

The lower jaw of Skhūl I child showing features characteristics of Neanderthals.

Advanced Analysis Confirms Hybrid Traits

The researchers reached these conclusions after conducting a series of advanced tests on the fossil. First, they scanned the skull and jaw using micro-CT technology at the Shmunis Family Anthropology Institute at Tel Aviv University, creating an accurate three-dimensional model from the scans. This enabled them to perform a complex morphological analysis of the anatomical structures (including non-visible structures such as the inner ear) and compare them to various hominid populations. To study the structure of the blood vessels surrounding the brain, they also created an accurate 3D reconstruction of the inside of the skull.

The fossil we studied is the earliest known physical evidence of mating between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. In 1998, a skeleton of a child was discovered in Portugal that showed traits of both of these human groups. But that skeleton, nicknamed the ‘Lapedo Valley Child,’ dates back to 28,000 years ago—more than 100,000 years after the Skhūl child. Traditionally, anthropologists have attributed the fossils discovered in the Skhūl Cave, along with fossils from the Qafzeh Cave near Nazareth, to an early group of Homo sapiens. The current study reveals that at least some of the fossils from the Skhūl Cave are the result of continuous genetic infiltration from the local—and older—Neanderthal population into the Homo sapiens population.

Professor Israël Hershkovitz.
Publication:
Bouvier, Bastien; Dambricourt Malassé, Anne; Otte, Marcel; Levitzky, Michael; Hershkovitz, Israël
A new analysis of the neurocranium and mandible of the Skhūl I child: Taxonomic conclusions and cultural implications
L'Anthropologie 129(3) (2025) 103385, DOI:10.1016/j.anthro.2025.103385

Abstract
The first individual discovered at Skhūl Cave in 1931 on Mount Carmel in Israel was a child aged between 3 and 5 years, intentionally buried ca. 140 ka ago. The fossil was allocated to Homo sapiens, Homo neanderthalensis, or a hybrid of the two species, and is currently recognized as “Anatomically Modern Human”. The incomplete mandible inadvertently separated from the skeleton during excavation, has been reconstructed and consolidated with plaster and appears to be plesiomorphic, with a strong affinity to the Neanderthal clade. The absence of the mid-face and of a large part of the skull base makes its articulation impossible. A new study using CT scans of the neurocranium and mandible was therefore undertaken to clarify their association and taxonomic status. The right bony labyrinth and the enamel-dentine junction (EDJ) of M1 have been virtually reconstructed for the current study and compared to other Homo fossils. The bony labyrinth was compared with two “Western” Neanderthals, La Ferrassie 1, La Quina H5 and one Homo sapiens, Cro-Magnon 1. The frontal squama was initially mispositioned and has been virtually realigned to a more anatomically accurate orientation through comparison with the Neandertal child Le Pech--’Azé. The shape of the bony labyrinth is anatomically modern, but the vault is low, the occipital is elongated with a slight nuchal plane, the foramen magnum is dorsally located, the anterior dentoalveolar shape of the mandible is characteristic of Neanderthal and there is no mentum osseum. The EDJ of M1 is plesiomorphic with a mid-trigonid crest also commonly seen in Neanderthals. Such mosaic of Homo sapiens, Neanderthals, and plesiomorphic characters are also seen in the post-cranial skeleton. The combination of features seen in Skhūl I may suggest that the child is a hybrid. In the Middle Pleistocene, the Levant was the crossroad of gene flows between Indigenous lineages and other taxa from Africa and Eurasia which is likely the explanation for Skhūl I anthropological. Therefore, contrary to the prevailing paradigm, the earliest known mortuary practices involving burials cannot be attributed exclusively to Homo sapiens over Homo neanderthalensis. A new chapter opens on both the origins and motivations of these rituals.

Bouvier, Bastien; Dambricourt Malassé, Anne; Otte, Marcel; Levitzky, Michael; Hershkovitz, Israël
A new analysis of the neurocranium and mandible of the Skhūl I child: Taxonomic conclusions and cultural implications
L'Anthropologie 129(3) (2025) 103385, DOI:10.1016/j.anthro.2025.103385

© 2025 Elsevier B.V., its licensors, and contributors.
Reprinted under the terms of s60 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

For creationists, each new discovery like the Skhūl child is another punch to a fighter who has already been knocked out, lying on the canvas, but somehow still insisting they’re winning the match. The evidence of human-Neanderthal hybrids, migrations tens of thousands of years before the Bible’s invented timeline, and the very existence of multiple hominin species leaves creationism reeling in denial. Yet, in the fantasy world of biblical literalism, none of this happened; fossils are tricks, timelines are conspiracies, and scientists are all engaged in a global plot to undermine their faith.

But the blows keep coming. The Skhūl fossil doesn’t just stretch the timeline—it shreds the very premise of Genesis. If there were already anatomically modern humans in the Levant 140,000 years ago, interbreeding with Neanderthals, then the notion of a single ancestral couple whose sin cursed all humanity collapses under its own absurdity. No Adam, no Eve, no Eden, no “original sin”—and no need for salvation. In short, the entire theological house of cards crumbles.

The irony, of course, is that this find comes not from some distant corner of the globe but from the very region the Bible mythologises. Science, from the very soil of “Holy Land,” exposes the myth for what it is: a Bronze Age story with no bearing on reality. Yet creationists, like the punch-drunk boxer, will stagger back to their corner, refusing to admit the obvious defeat. The rest of us, meanwhile, can marvel at the real story of our species — complex, fascinating, and infinitely more inspiring than the childish fables they cling to.

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