Israel Hershkovitz

Before entering biological anthropology, Hershkovitz studied toward nearly two degrees in clinical psychology. He left that field after deciding that "the biology of the human being interests me more than the human psyche."[3]

Hershkovitz holds a professorship in the Department of Anatomy and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University's Sackler Faculty of Medicine and directs the Dan David Center for Human Evolution and Biohistory Research at the university's Steinhardt Museum of Natural History.[1] His research centers on human evolution and the study of ancient fossil remains found in Israel and at other sites worldwide.[4]

He also developed a specialization in forensic anthropology, which he describes as a branch of biological anthropology concerned with identification.[4] For years he served as a consultant to Israel's National Center of Forensic Medicine and worked with the United Nations identifying victims of war crimes during the Yugoslav Wars.[5]

Hershkovitz describes forensic identification from skeletal remains as "osteobiography": assembling a biological profile from bones found at a scene, then comparing that profile with records of missing persons.[5] The process can incorporate tiny bone fragments, anthropological and genetic information, and the circumstances in which remains were discovered, with neither the biological profile nor genetic data necessarily sufficient by itself.[5]

Following the October 7 attack, Hershkovitz's team applied these methods to identify victims.[5] He described one identification made from a bone fragment less than an inch long and noted that a single case could take as long as a month to complete.[5] A separate account reports that the most complex identification his team undertook relied on a fragment smaller than two centimeters.[4]

Manot Cave in northern Israel came to scholarly attention after a bulldozer laying a sewage line for the local village accidentally punctured a hole through its roof; subsequent exploration uncovered artifacts and human remains.[2] A team of roughly two dozen researchers from Israeli and overseas universities examined the recovered skull fragment and concluded it was the upper portion of the cranium—the calvaria—of a young adult who died approximately 55,000 years ago.[2]

Hershkovitz noted that human remains are rare in the Middle East and that remains found there typically belong to other early hominid species.[2] He said the Manot skull looked markedly different from other regional specimens but was strikingly similar to fossils excavated in Africa from the same period, interpreting it as a link between older African populations and later European populations in the context of modern human dispersal out of Africa.[2] Hershkovitz also co-authored a 2021 study published in the Journal of Human Evolution examining climate and environment at Manot Cave, drawing on isotope records from four stalagmites that grew almost continuously from approximately 75,000 to 26,500 years ago.[6] The study identified climatic fluctuations corresponding to Dansgaard–Oeschger cycles and Heinrich events and proposed that a shift toward open, grassy landscapes dominated by C4 vegetation may have played a role in the development of cultural entities such as the Early Ahmarian.[6]

An adult upper jawbone with several teeth was discovered in 2002 at Misliya Cave on Mount Carmel. After fifteen years of research by an international multidisciplinary team, Hershkovitz and Prof. Mina Weinstein-Evron of the University of Haifa co-led the study that identified the fossil as Homo sapiens and published the findings in Science.[7][1] Radiometric dating placed the specimen at 177,000–194,000 years old, making it among the earliest then-known evidence of Homo sapiens outside Africa.[1]

Hershkovitz said the fossil and its associated tools supported a northern route out of Africa via the Nile Valley and the eastern Mediterranean coast, and suggested that Homo sapiens had left Africa by approximately 200,000 years ago or earlier.[7] He characterized the find as challenging the conventional timeline in which modern humans departed Africa around 100,000 years ago, and argued that it required rethinking both the chronology and the definition of anatomically modern humans.[1] Hershkovitz also raised the possibility, presented as a qualified interpretation rather than a demonstrated conclusion, that some morphological development of modern humans may have occurred outside Africa—perhaps in the Land of Israel—partly through interbreeding with Neanderthals and Denisovans.[1]

Among Hershkovitz's most discussed contributions is his leadership of the anthropological team that studied fossil remains from the Nesher Ramla site, located in a quarry at the Nesher cement plant near Ramla. The excavation was led by Dr. Yossi Zaidner, who found the remains; Hershkovitz led the anthropological analysis alongside Dr. Hila May and Dr. Rachel Sarig.[3] The recovered material included a skull fragment, a nearly complete lower jaw assembled from seventeen pieces, and a tooth, published in Science.[3]

Dated to approximately 120,000–140,000 years ago—with the researchers proposing the group lived in the region from roughly 400,000 to 120,000 years ago—the remains displayed large teeth and jaws resembling Neanderthals alongside a skull with features of archaic Homo.[8][3] The team concluded the fossils did not fit neatly into known Neanderthal or Homo sapiens categories and named the group Nesher Ramla Homo after the site.[8] The identification rested on morphological comparison; researchers have noted that DNA older than 15,000 years has not been recovered in Israel, leaving genetic confirmation unavailable for these much older remains.[9][3]

Hershkovitz argued that the group represented a previously unrecognized population important to the ancestry of later human groups, including Neanderthals, and proposed that this ancestral population lived in the Levant and moved repeatedly westward into Europe and eastward into Asia.[3] He also suggested that some fossils previously classified as distinct species could instead be local variants of Nesher Ramla Homo, and associated older specimens from sites such as Qesem Cave with the proposed group.[8] He described Israel as a geographic bridge between Africa, Europe, and Asia, and argued that this position explains the exceptional density of prehistoric sites there.[9]

Hershkovitz has also investigated fossil evidence bearing on contact between early human groups. Co-leading a study with Anne Dambricourt-Malassé of the French National Centre for Scientific Research, he examined a roughly 140,000-year-old child's skeleton from Skhul Cave on Mount Carmel, remains that had been discovered approximately ninety years earlier.[10] The team reported that the skeleton combined features associated with both Homo sapiens and Neanderthals: its skull's overall shape resembled Homo sapiens, while the intracranial blood-supply system, lower jaw, and inner-ear structure were described as Neanderthal-like.[10] Hershkovitz characterized the fossil as the earliest known physical evidence of mating between the two groups.[10]

In a separate context, examining evidence for Neanderthal social behavior, Hershkovitz has discussed how healed fractures in Neanderthal skeletons suggest that injured individuals survived and received care from others, reflecting the presence of social support structures within those communities.[11]

Hershkovitz's scientific work combines anatomical analysis of fossils with broader questions about migration and contact among human populations. The Misliya study reported fossil evidence of Homo sapiens outside Africa dating to 177,000–194,000 years ago, substantially earlier than the conventional chronology it challenged.[1] The Manot and Nesher Ramla projects supplied fossil evidence used in competing models of human dispersal, interaction, and Neanderthal ancestry.[2][3]

His work also connects prehistoric osteology with practical identification. Expertise developed through skeletal analysis has been applied to United Nations war-crimes investigations and to identifying victims after the October 7 attack.[5][4]

Several of Hershkovitz's major findings have generated scholarly debate. The interpretation of the Manot skull as a link between African and European populations rests on morphological comparison; some scientists raised the hypothesis that the skull might belong to a Homo sapiens–Neanderthal hybrid, citing a bulge at the back of the skull known as "bunning," though this hypothesis could not be tested because DNA could not be extracted from the fragment.[2]

The Nesher Ramla findings—including the identification of a distinct human group, its proposed relationship to Neanderthal origins, and claims about migration and interbreeding—are interpretations of fossil morphology without genetic confirmation from the specimens, and the published research was met with disagreement from other scholars.[9][3] Similarly, outside experts quoted in reporting on the Misliya discovery disputed whether the associated stone tools necessarily had to have been made by Homo sapiens, arguing that Neanderthals or another human relative could have produced them.[7] The age of the Misliya jawbone is also reported slightly differently across sources: 177,000–194,000 years in one account and 170,000–200,000 years in another.[12][7] Hershkovitz has also disputed the widely publicized interpretation that the fossil hominin Lucy died from a fall from a tree, arguing that bone breaks in fossils can have multiple causes, including post-burial processes, and that the available evidence is not conclusive.[11]