A groundbreaking study of a child’s skull found in a northern Israeli cave has found that the world’s first incidence of sex between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals took place at least 100,000 years before scientists previously thought.

Research teams from Tel Aviv University and the French National Center for Scientific Research applied new research techniques to the 140,000-year-old skull of a five-year-old child discovered 90 years ago in the Skhul Cave on Mount Carmel, in northern Israel.

They discovered that the skull — initially thought to belong to a Homo sapiens child — bore physical characteristics of both Homo sapiens and Neanderthals.

Until that point, the earliest evidence of such morphological mingling anywhere in the world was found in a skull dated to some 40,000 years in a Romanian cave.

Genetic analysis had also suggested interaction for a short period between 40,000 and 50,000 years ago.

The new 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.

It involved scanning the skull and jaw using micro-CT technology at the Shmunis Family Anthropology Institute at Tel Aviv University.

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