PEOPLING

The First Faces of Homo sapiens

~315,000 years ago

Palaeolithic · Middle Stone Age · MIS 9

The oldest fossils attributed to our species come from Jebel Irhoud, in Morocco: the remains of several people, found in the same layers as Middle Stone Age flint tools that had been heated in fires, which is what allowed the site to be dated to about 315,000 years ago. Their faces, jaws and teeth already look like ours, while the back of the skull still runs long, an older shape. The oldest assemblages of that same tool tradition come from the other end of the continent.

Why it matters

A single cradle is exactly what these fossils argue against. Morocco lies four thousand kilometres from the east African sites that long held the oldest record, and the tools link the two ends of the continent: the evidence points to an emergence involving the whole of Africa, populations connected and drifting apart again, rather than one valley where humanity began. Every person alive descends from that African web.

Dating & uncertainty

The thermoluminescence age is 315 ± 34 thousand years, and the deeper question is what the date is dating. The Jebel Irhoud people mix a face like ours with an elongated braincase, so researchers speak of early stages of the H. sapiens clade rather than of a birthday: depending on where the species boundary is drawn, our origin moves by tens of thousands of years.

Sources

1. Hublin et al. (2017), Nature · New fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco and the pan-African origin of Homo sapiensdoi:10.1038/nature22336
2. Richter et al. (2017), Nature · The age of the hominin fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, and the origins of the Middle Stone Agedoi:10.1038/nature22335
3. Stringer (2016), Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B · The origin and evolution of Homo sapiensdoi:10.1098/rstb.2015.0237

Our species’ history as one day

00:00:0024 h before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day