The true root of our species, Homo sapiens. This is what an international team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Leipzig (Germany) and the National Institute of Archeology and Heritage (INSAP, Rabat, Morocco) have discovered after finding at the Jebel Irhoud site, some 100 kilometers from Marrakech in western Morocco, the fossil remains of three young adults about 315,000 years old. Two studies on it have been published in the journal Nature.
The remains have been found along with stone tools and animal bones and represent the oldest and most surely dated fossil evidence of our own species. The funny thing is that this finding forces us to rewrite our history , since the date from which the fossils date is 100,000 before the oldest Homo sapiens fossils that we were aware of (195,000 years ago in what is now Ethiopia), which shows a complex evolutionary history of humanity that probably involved the entire African continent.
Both the genetic data of current humans and the fossil remains discovered point to an African origin of the species Homo sapiens.
Until now, most researchers believed that all humans today descended from a population that lived in East Africa about 200,000 years ago. “We used to think that was a cradle of humanity 200,000 ago in eastern Africa, but n new ur data reveal that Homo sapiens spread throughout Africa about 300,000 years ago. Long before dispersal out of Africa, there was dispersal of Homo sapiens within Africa “, clarifies Jean-Jacques Hublin, leader of the first work.
The fossil remains found at Jebel Irhoud include skulls (with a modern face and a thin jaw), teeth, and long bones of at least five individuals. To provide an accurate chronology of these findings, the researchers used the thermoluminescence dating method on hot flints found in the same deposits. These flints yielded an approximate age of 300,000 years and thus push back the origins of our species by 100,000 years.
“We use state-of-the-art dating methods and take the most conservative approaches to accurately determine Irhoud’s age,” adds Daniel Richter, leader of the second study.
“Our findings suggest that modern human facial morphology was established very early in the history of our species, and that brain shape, and possibly brain function, evolved within the Homo sapiens lineage,” comments Philipp Gunz, a co-author of the work.
Aside from the above evidence, experts have found deposits containing the bones of animals that showed signs of having been hunted (gazelles, probably) and various layers of charcoal in the sediments , suggesting that the cave’s inhabitants already used fire. .
Referencia: Jean-Jacques Hublin et al, New fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco and the pan-African origin of Homo sapiens, Nature (2017). DOI: 10.1038/nature22336
Daniel Richter et al, The age of the hominin fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, and the origins of the Middle Stone Age, Nature (2017). DOI: 10.1038/nature22335
Image credit: Philipp Gunz, MPI EVA Leipzig
