Australian scientist rewriting the history of human migration

A Brisbane scientist has played a critical role in completely re-writing the history of humanity's migration from Africa. 

Previously it had been thought homo-sapiens left Arica about a hundred thousand years ago but thanks to this latest scientific breakthrough it's now believed to be closer to two hundred thousand years ago. 

Griffith University's Professor Rainer Grün is the world's leading fossil dating expert. 

Professor Grün was called on to examine part of a human jaw discovered by an international team of archaeologists in a cave in Israel. 

Radiocarbon dating can only date back around 50,000 years, so Professor Grun and his team used uranium-series and Electron Spin Resonance methods to directly date the human fossil. 

Their findings put the age range between 177,000 and 194,000 years, pushing back by around 50,000 to 60,000 years the earliest evidence of modern humans ever discovered outside Africa. 

"Previous finds out of Africa, in the Levantine corridor and China, dated the first modern humans to around 100,000 years but now we can prove through our dating analysis that Homo sapiens left Africa as far back as around 200,000 years ago," Professor Grün said. 

"Best of all, the approach we used ensure a minimum destruction of the remains." 

Remarkably the human remains were discovered back in 2002 meaning it's taken sixteen years to determine their true significance. 

Sixteen years? That's just a blip on the radar when it comes to the history of humanity.