Reassessment of the morphological evidence for hominin hybrids in the Levant
The Levantine hominin fossil and archaeological records have played a central role in long-standing palaeoanthropological debates over origin models and possible interbreeding between Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) and Homo sapiens. Recent research has provided a strong framework for the morphological expectations of recent hybrid ancestry in primates, along with renewed suggestions that early Late Pleistocene hominins from the Levant show morphological evidence of hybridization. Here we address these developments by using established diagnostic features of H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis to review possible fossil evidence of hybridization from the key Levantine sites of Qafzeh, Skhūl, and Tabūn. We conclude that, while individuals from these sites show a perplexing combination of characteristics that broadly overlap with expectations of hybridization, this explanation can only be established once other alternatives have been ruled out, or through the recovery of genetic material from these key fossils.
