KAFZEH

also spelled Qafzeh, rock shelter south of Nazareth, Israel, where the remains of 11 fossil hominid skeletonsdating from between 45,000 and 60,000 years agowere recovered. The Jebel Kafzeh site was first excavated in the early 1930s by R. Neuville, the French consul general in Jerusalem. More recent excavations were carried out in the 1960s and early '70s by Bernard Vandermeersch of the University of Paris. The remains, the largest group yet recovered for this period in the Middle East, are associated with the Mousterian (stone tool) industry, normally found associated with Neanderthal man in Europe. The remains at Kafzeh, however, have been classified by Vandermeersch as belonging to Homo sapiens sapiens, i.e., modern man, and therefore Kafzeh contains the remains of the earliest Homo sapiens sapiens yet recovered. Other authorities, however, classify these remains as nonclassical Neanderthal.