A miner's souvenir skull pushed back the origin of our species by 100,000 years
In 1961 a miner digging for baryte in Morocco pulled a skull from a cave wall and handed it to an engineer, who kept it as a keepsake. Decades later, finds from that same cave at Jebel Irhoud were dated to around 315,000 years ago, making them the oldest known Homo sapiens.
Jebel Irhoud lies about 50 kilometres south-east of Safi, the remains of a limestone cave packed with 8 metres of Pleistocene sediment. After the skull reached the University of Rabat, anthropologist Émile Ennouchi led excavations that began by blasting away some 2,000 tons of overlying debris. His team found more hominin bones, including a child's jaw, alongside Mousterian stone tools, the kind associated with Neanderthals, so that is what the fossils were first called. Radiocarbon dating simply showed the site was older than the method could measure.
The Neanderthal label did not last. By 1978 comparisons with other African and Levantine fossils showed the skull was something else, and animal bones in the deposits hinted at a much older age than first assumed. Researchers then treated the people as an archaic form of our species, consistent with the prevailing view that modern humans arose in East Africa around 200,000 years ago.
The turning point came with new digs led by Jean-Jacques Hublin from 2004. His team recovered more than 20 bones from at least five individuals, including a child of about seven and a half, plus stone tools that had been scorched by later fires. Thermoluminescence dating of those burnt flints, published in 2017, put them at roughly 315,000 years old. The faces look strikingly modern, short and tucked under the braincase, though the jaws are large and the skulls longer at the back.
If correct, early Homo sapiens was spread across Africa a hundred thousand years earlier than thought, with modern traits emerging in different regions of a large, interbreeding population. The finds also led scientists to reassign South Africa's Florisbad skull to our species. Not everyone is convinced: attempts to extract DNA failed, and the boundaries between Homo species remain fuzzy.
Source: Jebel Irhoud
