Oldest Homo sapiens fossils ever found push humanity's birth back to 300,000 years
Digging on a hilltop in the Sahara Desert, scientists have found the most ancient known members of our own species, undermining longstanding ideas about the origins of humanity.
The newfound Homo sapiens fossils — three young adults, one adolescent and a child of 7 or 8 — date back roughly 300,000 years, says a study in this week’s Nature. The next-oldest fossils of Homo sapiens, the scientific name for humans, are about 200,000 years old.
The 200,000-year-old fossils were found in eastern Africa, sometimes called the “Garden of Eden” for its supposedly pivotal role as the birthplace of humanity. But the new fossils are from Morocco in far northern Africa, supporting the theory that the evolution of modern humans was a piecemeal affair that played out across the continent.
“There is no Garden of Eden in Africa,” said Jean-Jacques Hublin, co-author of two new studies describing the fossils and a paleontologist at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. “Or if there is a Garden of Eden, it’s … the size of Africa.”
The new finds confirm “modern humans do not suddenly appear like the Big Bang, with all the bells and whistles that we associate with modern humans,” agrees paleoanthropologist Bernard Wood of George Washington University, who was not associated with the study.
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