The understanding of human origins was turned on its head on Wednesday with the announcement of the discovery of fossils unearthed on a Moroccan hillside that are about 100,000 years older than any other known remains of our species, Homo sapiens.
Scientists determined that skulls, limb bones and teeth representing at least five individuals were about 300,000 years old, a blockbuster discovery in the field of anthropology.
The antiquity of the fossils was startling. But their discovery in North Africa, not East or even sub-Saharan Africa, also defied expectations. And the skulls, with faces and teeth matching people today but with archaic and elongated braincases, showed our brain needed more time to evolve its current form.
Before the discovery at the site called Jebel Irhoud, located between Marrakech and Morocco’s Atlantic coast, the oldest Homo sapiens fossils were known from an Ethiopian site called Omo Kibish, dated to 195,000 years ago.
The Moroccan fossils, found in what was a cave setting, represented three adults, one adolescent and one child roughly age 8, thought to have lived a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
These were found alongside bones of animals including gazelles and zebras that they hunted, stone tools perhaps used as spearheads and knives, and evidence of extensive fire use.
There is broad agreement among scientists that Homo sapiens originated in Africa. These findings suggest a complex evolutionary history probably involving the entire continent, with Homo sapiens by 300,000 years ago dispersed all over Africa.
Homo sapiens is now the only human species, but 300,000 years ago it would have shared the planet with several now-extinct cousins in Eurasia — Neanderthals in the west and Denisovans in the east — and others in Africa.
The Director of the Department of Human Evolution at the Max Planck Institute For Evolutionary Anthropology, Professor Jean-Jacques Hublin, said the discovery had a lot of implications.
“With the discoveries in Jebel Irhoud what we see is that there are more primitive forms of Homo Sapiens which are not modern humans but which are clearly related to our ancestry and these forms exist outside of East Africa, in North Africa and they are much older — 300,000 years ago — and this has a lot of implications, not just about the timing and the place where we evolved first but also about the very process of emergence of what we call Homo Sapiens,” Hublin said.
“One of the main implications of this discovery is that when one looks at all the findings in east, south and northwestern Africa now, the picture emerging is that most likely these early Homo Sapiens dispersed all over Africa before 300,000.
“They were making some kind of tools we call early-middle Stone Age and we find these industries at about at the same time in different places in Africa.
So, in other words, the picture is that the evolution of our species that is going to lead to the emergence of what we call modern humans, humans like us, likely took place all over the African continent.”
