Arrival· Where Sapiens lives
Africa
315 ka
Africa is where the species begins, and for a quarter of a million years every lineage that still has descendants today lives there. People did leave earlier; none of those departures left a trace in anyone alive.
What the evidence shows
Jebel Irhoud, in Morocco, is dated to 315,000 years give or take 34,000, by thermoluminescence on flints that had been heated in a fire; a tooth from the Irhoud 3 jaw gives 286,000 years by an independent method. The faces, jaws and teeth are already ours. The braincase is not: it is long and low where ours is round. Modernity arrived piece by piece rather than all at once, and it arrived across the whole continent, not in one cradle. Reviewers of the genetic and fossil records go further: no point in time can currently be identified at which our ancestry was confined to a single birthplace.
Dating & uncertainty
The date is well measured; what it dates is the open question. The Jebel Irhoud people already carry a face like ours on a longer braincase, and the African record before them is thin and scattered.
Sources
- Hublin et al. (2017), Nature · New fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco and the pan-African origin of Homo sapiens
- Richter et al. (2017), Nature · The age of the hominin fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, and the origins of the Middle Stone Age
- Stringer (2016), Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B · The origin and evolution of Homo sapiens
- Bergström et al. (2021), Nature · Origins of modern human ancestry