Eight recently discovered teeth are very similar to those of
modern humans and date back 400,000 years... 200,000 years older
than our species is supposed to be. To explain this mystery, we
must retrace human evolution. The Teeth in the Cave The finding
sparks a major mystery in the story of human evolution. All
previous evidence - and there's an awful lot of previous
evidence - had suggested the first anatomically modern humans
emerged from archaic Homo sapiens about 200,000 years ago, and
then only in Africa. So what are teeth that apparently belong to
an anatomically modern human doing in an Israeli cave 400,000
years ago? That's the mystery that paleontologists will now have
to deal with. Tel Aviv University's Avi Gopher led the team that
made the find. He explains just what they discovered in the
cave: "Our cave was used for a period of about 250,000 years —
from about 400,000 years ago to about 200,000 years ago. The
teeth are scattered through the layers of the cave, some in the
deeper part, that is to