Ian Sample - Oldest Homo sapiens bones ever found shake foundations of the human story
Fossils recovered from
an old mine on a desolate mountain in Morocco have rocked one of the most
enduring foundations of the human story: that Homo sapiens arose
in a cradle
of humankind in East Africa 200,000 years ago.
Archaeologists
unearthed the bones of at least five people at Jebel Irhoud, a former barite
mine 100km west of Marrakesh, in excavations that lasted years. They knew the
remains were old, but were stunned when dating tests revealed that a tooth and
stone tools found with the bones were about 300,000 years old. “My reaction was a big ‘wow’,” said
Jean-Jacques Hublin, a senior scientist on the team at the Max Planck Institute
for Evolutionary Anthropology in
Leipzig. “I was expecting them to be old, but not that old.”
Hublin said the
extreme age of the bones makes them the oldest known specimens of modern humans
and poses a major challenge to the idea that the earliest members of our
species evolved in a “Garden of Eden” in East Africa one hundred
thousand years later. “This gives us a
completely different picture of the evolution of our species. It goes much
further back in time, but also the very process of evolution is different to
what we thought,” Hublin told the Guardian. “It looks like our species was
already present probably all over Africa by 300,000 years ago. If there was a
Garden of Eden, it might have been the size of the continent.”
Jebel
Irhoud has thrown up puzzles for scientists since fossilised bones
were first found at the site in the 1960s. Remains found in 1961 and 1962, and
stone tools recovered with them, were attributed to Neanderthals and at first
considered to be only 40,000 years old. At the time, a popular view held that
modern humans evolved from Neanderthals. Today, the Neanderthals are considered
a sister group that lived alongside, and even
bred with, our modern human ancestors.. read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/07/oldest-homo-sapiens-bones-ever-found-shake-foundations-of-the-human-story
