Hofmeyr Skull

The Hofmeyr Skull is a prehistoric fossilized human skull. The skull provides evidence supporting the recent single-origin hypothesis, which suggests that anatomically modern humans evolved in Africa before 200,000 to 100,000 years ago, with members of one branch leaving Africa about 80,000 years ago, spreading to the rest of the world and replacing other Homo species already there.

The skull was found in 1952 at the coordinates -31.56667°N, 25.96667°W, in a dry channel bed of the Vlekpoort River, near Hofmeyr, a small town in Eastern Cape, South Africa.

Background
Frederick E. Grine, an anthropologist and anatomist at State University of New York at Stony Brook, led the study. Grine says that he first noticed the skull on a bookshelf in a colleague's office in Cape Town, South Africa, and was inspired to reexamine the skull after noticing its likeness to the skulls of the first modern humans found in Europe.

It was not possible to date the skull using traditional radiocarbon dating, as the carbon had been leached out of the bone, so a new method developed by Richard Bailey of England's Oxford University involving a combination of optically stimulated luminescence and uranium-series dating methods was used. The skull was dated to 36,000 years old, by removing grains of sand from the skull's braincase and determining when quartz crystals in the sand were last exposed to sunlight.

Analysis
The Hofmeyr fossil was compared with skulls from Sub-Saharan Africa, including those of the Khoisan, who are geographically proximate to the find. Using 3-dimensional measurement and mapping techniques, team member Katerina Harvati of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, found that the Hofmeyr Skull is actually quite distinct from those found in Sub-Saharan Africans such as the Khoisan.

The skull's features were found however to have a very close affinity with Upper Paleolithic Eurasians.