Advanced dating methods show the 'Ubeidiya site in the Jordan Valley is about 1.9 million years old — hundreds of thousands of years older than thought. That makes it roughly as old as Dmanisi in Georgia, placing both among the earliest known human settlements outside Africa.
The timing of when our early relatives first left Africa shapes the whole timeline of human evolution. Pushing that date back hundreds of thousands of years means early humans spread across new landscapes far sooner than textbooks assumed, and it narrows the search window for the earliest migrations.
✦ The journey out of Africa began much earlier than we thought.