Moroccan fossils may force a reevaluation of when and where Homo sapiens got our start
In 1961, miners in Morocco found what appeared to be human skulls, jaws, arm and hip bones. The bones were all fossilized, but pinning down their exact age was difficult since they’d been removed from their original location. Now a second round of excavations from the same site, known as Jebel Irhoud, has uncovered more fossils, plus stone tools and crucially, charred flint from a campfire. Using a technique known as thermoluminescence with that flint, the site is now thought to have been inhabited between close to 300,000 years ago… just 100,000 years before anyone thought humans even existed.
(Im)perfect model for modernity
The idea that there were ancient hominids in Africa 300,000 years ago isn’t that shocking by itself. Other species, like Homo naledi, lived at that time too. Neanderthals had already left Africa altogether. However, the bones from Jebel Irhoud look strikingly like modern humans, and have been labeled as Homo sapiens. They’re not a perfect match though— they don’t have a modern chin, one specimen had a rather pronounced brow, and the shape of the brain case is tapered towards the back of the head. This has some anthropologists suggesting that these people were a transitional species, rather than truly modern humans, but even if that were the case, their overall similarity and age still merit some reexamination of humanity’s origins.
Overhauling our origin story
On one hand, 300,000-year-old humans may help make sense of a few things. The so-called Florisbad skull from South Africa was dated to be 260,000 years old, which made it seem like a weird outlier in the human family tree. However, if the Jebel Irhoud do represent even older members of H. sapiens, then the Florisbad skull fits into the story more neatly. Similarly, the tools found in Morocco were generally light weight, with spears that were appropriate for throwing instead of just stabbing. They’re not the only tools from this time period to have this degree of sophistication, and the thought is that if modern humans arose around 300,000 years ago, these tools might be more tightly bound to our evolution and success.
Of course, on the other hand, the location of Jebel Irhoud opens a whole host of new questions. Previously, the leading model was that H. sapiens started in Ethiopia around 200,000 years ago, with our oldest confirmed specimen dated as 195,000 years old. From that birthplace, it was though that humans started spreading out to other parts of the world, a narrative that doesn’t have space for humans to somehow be on the opposite side of the continent 100,000 years earlier. It seems that humans, or our very close ancestors, were actually spread across Africa, with no clear point of origin standing out at this point. To fill in more gaps, more fossils are needed. For better or for worse, those fossils might be all over the continent.
Source: Scientists Have Found the Oldest Known Human Fossils by Ed Yong, The Atlantic
