For decades, the story of humanity’s first journey out of Africa had a fairly tidy shape. Early humans left Africa around 1.8 million years ago, carrying simple stone tools. The more sophisticated toolmakers, the ones who shaped elegant hand axes, followed later, perhaps a few hundred thousand years behind.

A new study of a site in Israel’s Jordan Valley suggests that tidy shape may be wrong. If its dating holds, two distinct traditions of toolmaking left Africa at roughly the same moment, nearly two million years ago.

The Site

‘Ubeidiya lies about 3 kilometers south of the Sea of Galilee, in the Jordan Rift Valley. It was discovered by accident in May 1959, when a member of nearby Kibbutz Afikim was leveling ground with a bulldozer and turned up fossil bones. Excavations began in 1960 under Moshe Stekelis and continued for years under Ofer Bar-Yosef and Naama Goren-Inbar, two archaeologists who went on to become major figures in the field.

What they found made ‘Ubeidiya famous. The site holds thousands of stone tools, including some of the oldest Acheulean hand axes known outside Africa: carefully shaped, two-sided tools that represent a real leap in planning and skill. It also holds the bones of a remarkable mix of animals, among them hippopotamus, sabre-toothed cats, giant buffalo, and other species with African, Asian, and European origins. Human remains are scarce: a few teeth, and a juvenile vertebra announced in 2022.

Until now, the site was usually dated to between 1.2 and 1.6 million years ago. Those dates were indirect, however. They came from comparing ‘Ubeidiya’s animal fossils with similar fossils found at other sites, a method called biochronology.

Three Clocks

The new study, led by geologist Prof. Ari Matmon of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with archaeologist Prof. Omry Barzilai of the University of Haifa and paleoecologist Prof. Miriam Belmaker of the University of Tulsa, was published in Quaternary Science Reviews in 2026. Instead of relying on comparisons, the team measured the site’s age directly with three independent methods:

  1. Cosmogenic burial dating. When rocks sit at the surface, cosmic rays create rare isotopes inside them. Once the rocks are buried, those isotopes decay at a known rate, so their levels reveal how long the rocks have been underground. This method gave a median age of around two million years.
  2. Paleomagnetism. Earth’s magnetic field has flipped many times, and lake sediments record which way it pointed when they settled. The ‘Ubeidiya sediments fit a period of reversed polarity that points to great age, possibly a reversal between 1.7 and 1.9 million years ago.
  3. Uranium-lead dating of snail shells. Shells of Melanopsis, a freshwater snail, gave a minimum age of 1.3 million years. That figure is a floor, not an estimate, because chemical changes in the shells can take hundreds of thousands of years.

Combining the three produced a probability curve with 1.9 million years ago as the most likely age.

The study also had to explain a puzzle. Some early measurements suggested certain rocks were about 3 million years old, far older than anything else at the site. The team concluded that these sediments had been recycled: buried, exposed, and moved around within the Dead Sea rift before finally settling at ‘Ubeidiya. Their model accounts for the odd readings and supports the revised age. This kind of careful reconciliation of conflicting data is exactly what makes a new date credible.

Two Toolkits, One Departure

The most important implication concerns Dmanisi, in the country of Georgia, where early human fossils and simple Oldowan tools date to about 1.8 million years ago. Dmanisi has long been considered the oldest well-established human site outside Africa, and its simpler toolkit seemed to confirm the tidy story: basic toolmakers first, hand axe makers later.

‘Ubeidiya now appears to be the same age or slightly older. As Barzilai told the Times of Israel, scholars had believed the Dmanisi population came earlier, “and the new dating shows that this is not the case.” In his view, “both tool traditions likely left Africa and reached Eurasia at roughly the same time, around 1.9 million years ago.”

In other words, at least two distinct groups of early humans, with different anatomy and different technologies, may have been moving out of Africa at about the same time. Barzilai has also pointed to the African animals found at the site, including monkeys and antelopes, as a sign that this was a broad movement of many species out of Africa, not just a few wandering human bands.

Belmaker notes a further consequence. The animals at ‘Ubeidiya were previously assumed to date from 1.2 to 1.4 million years ago. If the site is 1.9 million years old, “these species already lived two million years ago,” which reshapes the picture of how animals, and the humans among them, spread across the region.

Part of a Pattern

‘Ubeidiya is not an isolated surprise. Over the past decade, evidence of early humans outside Africa has kept getting older. Stone tools at Shangchen in central China have been dated to about 2.1 million years ago, and cut-marked animal bones at Grăunceanu in Romania to around 2 million years ago. Barzilai himself mentions these finds, along with a sensible note of caution: new dates must be “reliable and supported by multiple lines of evidence,” but “we may need to rethink some of our assumptions.”

The Heterodox Takeaway

This is not a fringe claim. It comes from established researchers, using standard methods, published in a respected journal. That is exactly why it matters for a site like this one.

The lesson is about how confident timelines really are. A date that appeared in textbooks for decades, 1.2 to 1.6 million years, turns out to have rested on indirect comparisons, and direct measurement has pushed it back by hundreds of thousands of years. The story of an orderly, single-file exit from Africa now looks more like what Haaretz described as a chaotic jumble of different groups coexisting and competing.

None of this overturns the broad picture that our lineage began in Africa. But it is a reminder that the deep human past was messier, earlier, and more crowded than the standard story allowed, and that some of the dates we treat as settled are only as good as the methods behind them. When better clocks arrive, the story changes. We should expect it to keep changing.

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