The oldest Homo sapiens fossil, which dates back to at least 210,000 years ago, has been found for the first time outside Africa, researchers contended.

The skull was found encased in rock in a cliffside cave on Greece’s southern coast in 1978, as reported by Science News.

“Multiple Homo sapiens populations dispersed out of Africa starting much earlier, and reaching much farther into Europe, than previously thought,” paleoanthropologist Katerina Harvati of the University of Tübingen in Germany said at a news conference.

Harvati and her colleagues will extract DNA and species-distinguishing proteins from the Greek skulls to identify their evolutionary identities and to look for signs of interbreeding between humans and Neandertals, who reached Greece more than 200,000 years ago and died out around 40,000 years ago.