Our species is at least 300,000 years old, far older than once thought
For decades the Omo skulls from Ethiopia, about 195,000 years old, marked the dawn of anatomically modern humans. Then finds from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco pushed the date back to roughly 315,000 years. The picture that emerged is messier: early Homo sapiens arose across Africa and kept mixing with archaic relatives.
Linnaeus coined the name Homo sapiens in 1758; it means, roughly, wise or discerning human. Today we are the only surviving member of our lineage, with a high rounded braincase, a small brow ridge and a chin, which none of our relatives had. Many early fossils, though, blend old and new: Skhul V from Israel has heavy brow ridges and a jutting face over a thoroughly modern-looking skull vault, and nobody is sure whether that reflects mixed ancestry or leftover traits.
The branch leading to us seems to have separated from the one leading to Neanderthals and Denisovans somewhere between about 500,000 and 800,000 years ago, and tooth evolution hints at the older end. Homo heidelbergensis, long cast as the shared ancestor, now looks more like an early Neanderthal after DNA from Spain's Sima de los Huesos was published in 2016. A 2019 proposal places the first Homo sapiens between 350,000 and 260,000 years ago, formed by populations in East and South Africa merging, and the Khoisan peoples of southern Africa may preserve the oldest split among living humans.
In the 1980s scientists argued between a single recent African origin that replaced everyone else and a multiregional model in which archaic groups gradually converged. Ancient DNA since the 2000s landed in between: most of our ancestry comes from the Out-of-Africa expansion, yet interbreeding with archaic people in Africa and Eurasia continued between about 100,000 and 30,000 years ago.
Humans were planning ahead early. The Schöningen spears show big-game hunting with complex tools 300,000 years ago. Our lighter build has been linked to more cooperation and carrying resources, and one study connects rapid brain metabolic change with a drastic loss of muscle strength.
Source: Early modern human
