Study shows out-of-Africa migration to Israel
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Magnetic dating has showed that pre-humans living in
what is now Israel brought the latest Stone Age technology out of Africa much
earlier than believed, scientists said on Friday.

Their study adds to evidence that humans and their ancestors came out of
Africa in successive waves, each time bringing better and better technology
with them.

The site, at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov in Israel's Dead Sea Rift, is 780,000 years
old -- much older than the earlier estimates of 500,000 years, Craig Feibel
of Rutgers University in New Jersey and colleagues found.

"It's evidence, well-controlled in terms of time, of another wave coming out
of Africa which is bringing African innovation to the rest of the world,"
Feibel, whose team's findings were reported in the journal Science, said in a
telephone interview.

"What we see at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov is a whole new technology that also was
found at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. All of the technological breakthroughs
seem to have been made in Africa."

He said the site, on the edge of a swampy lake that was drained in the 1950s,
had long been known because of its rich collection of artefacts.

"The stone tools -- there are thousands and thousands of them," Feibel, a
geologist and anthropologist, said.

Some limb bones of the hominids who lived there, all members of the homo
erectus species, were also found.

"These are things that were found in 1930s and went into a museum drawer and
nobody knew what they were," Feibel said.

But using a relatively new method that allows scientists to detect the
magnetic orientation of the Earth at the time a layer of sediment went down,
Feibels' team was able to date the site to 780,000 years ago.

The technique is based on regular and known flips of the Earth's magnetic
field.

"When you get these transitions, when the Earth's magnetic field changes,
there are timelines that you get out of it," Feibel said.

As it happened, this site was right on one of those shifts. "If the site had
been a little bit older or a little bit younger it wouldn't have helped,"
Feibel said.

Because the tools at the site are so advanced, it shows that homo erectus was
bringing new culture out of Africa and to Europe and Asia much earlier than
had been believed. The tools belong to a style known as Acheulean, which
requires sophisticated planning and technological ability.

The site, because it was wet and swampy until recently, also holds other
treasures.

"This is a fantastic site," Feibel said. "It is what is called a wet site
because it is waterlogged. We have seeds and fruits. The driftwood that
washed up on the shore of the lake is still there, beautifully preserved."

The researchers, who include a team at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, have
identified more than 100 species already.

These include rabbits, various rodents, wild grapes, wild olives, water
chestnuts, water lilies, oak and jujubes.

"So many of those are edible species that it is certainly possible, if not
likely, that some of those were brought to the site by hominids in their
gathering activities," Feibel said.

Some of them are extinct in Israel today.

So does the site conjure up an image of these homo erectus people lounging on
the beach, eating olives and grapes and making hand axes?

"And taking a dip in the lake?" Feibel laughed.

"It really is hard (but) before it was drained, it was basically known as a
bunch of malarial swamps."