Oldest Homo sapiens fossils discovered in Morocco

washingtonpost.com - Bones found in a cave in Morocco add 100,000 years to the history of modern human fossils. These bones are from “early anatomically modern” humans — our own species, Homo sapiens, with a mixture of modern and primitive traits, an international team of anthropologists, paleontologists and evolutionary scientists report in a pair of papers published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Despite their primitive features, these ancient people could blend in with a modern crowd, study author Jean-Jacques Hublin of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, said in a news briefing Tuesday — particularly, he added, if hats covered their somewhat oddly shaped heads.

The oldest Homo sapiens bones known date to about 200,000 years ago, but the new analysis shows these bones are surprisingly old: 300,000 to 350,000 years old.

Workers discovered the bone site in the 1960s. Barite miners excavating a hill in western Morocco hit a pocket of red sediment with ancient stone tools, limbs and a human skull, which the workers gave to the quarry doctor. The doctor turned the skull over to scientists. It was a puzzling bone. At first the skull was linked to Neanderthals, a species that has been found in Europe but not Africa.

Discoveries of human fossils in Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania soon overshadowed the bones from the Moroccan hill. Complicating matters still, the quarry miners took few detailed records of where they found the bones. But the hill, named Jebel Irhoud, was not forgotten. Hublin explored the site several times in the 1980s and 1990s, though he had little luck.

In 2004, a cave at Jebel Irhoud yielded a tooth. And a year later, a second tooth. And then, finally, another cranium.

The Jebel Irhoud fossils are roughly 100,000 years older than any previously described modern human bones. In the late 1960s, Richard Leakey and his fellow paleoanthropologists found Homo sapiens fossils from the Kibish Formation of Ethiopia, dated at the time as 130,000 years old. In 2003, in Herto, Ethiopia, anthropologists said they found older Homo sapiens, about 160,000 years old. Two years later, a reanalysis of the Kibish specimens added 35,000 years, pushing fossil evidence of Homo sapiens to just under 200,000 years ago.

Based on the previous discoveries, experts suggested that human ancestors evolved into our species 200,000 years ago. But the new fossils shift that window in time back half again as long, to 300,000 years. (ontinueReading