Late Pleistocene human remains from the Sea Harvest site, Saldanha Bay, South Africa

The Sea Harvest fossil site has yielded an extensive mammalian fauna, including a human manual distal phalanx and a maxillary premolar. These most likely date to one of the cooler phases within the Last Interglaciation (isotope stage 5) between 128 and 74 kyr ago. Hyenas are implcated as the agent of accumulation of the large mammal remains, while a raptor or a smaller carnivore probably introduced the smaller mammal bones. The human specimens are comparable to modern homologues, and appear to have derived from a population that was more modern than Neandertals in at least one respect. As such, they may add to the small number of available fossils which suggest that modern humans originated in Africa at a time when Neandertals inhabited Europe. -Authors