300,000-year-old skulls that look shockingly like ours could rewrite the human origin story.

300,000-year-old skulls that look shockingly like ours 

could rewrite the human origin story.   

         

  

                    

Anthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin showing off one of the finds, a 

crushed human skull whose eye orbits are visible just beyond his 

fingertip. Shannon McPherron, MPI EVA Leipzig

Precisely when and where did our species emerge? Anthropologists have struggled 

with that question for decades, and scattered clues had suggested the answer lay 

somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa about 200,000 years ago.

But new evidence outlined in two papers published in the journal Nature challenges 

that hypothesis. Instead, the authors describe recently discovered remains that 

suggest the first Homo sapiens showed up more than 100,000 years earlier than we 

thought in a place many experts didn’t suspect.

The fossils could represent the earliest known examples of H. sapiens ever found (if 

confirmed by further research), and they serve as evidence that members of our 

species lived beyond sub-Saharan Africa.

Skulls in the dust

In 1961, a crew of miners was plowing into a dense wall of limestone in a hilly region 

west of Marrakesh when they struck a soft patch. The hardened beige surface gave 

way to a mound of cinnamon-colored dirt. Peeking out of the earth was a sliver of 

human skull.

A bit more digging revealed a nearly-complete skull, which the miners turned over to 

their field doctor. As word about the discovery spread, researchers flocked to the 

area. They uncovered more remains, including several pieces of jaw bone and a 

fragment of an arm. At the time, scientists pegged the fossils as roughly 40,000 years 

old, a few thousand years before our extinct European relatives, the Neanderthals, 

were thought to have vanished.

But they hadn’t dug deep enough.

The Jebel Irhoud site in Morocco. Shannon McPherron, MPI EVA Leipzig

Roughly 40 years later, anthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin and his team from the 

Max Planck Institute excavated the half-dozen layers of soil beneath the land where 

the skull and arm bones had been discovered. There, the team found remains that 

they say belong to at least five individuals. Using a dating technique that measures 

how much radiation has built up in a material since it was heated, Hublin and his 

team say the ancient bones came from people who lived roughly 300,000-350,000 

years ago.

“These dates were a big wow,” Hublin said on a recent call with reporters.

Still, the biggest discovery didn’t come until the team looked more closely at the 

skulls.

A striking resemblance

When Hublin peered into the cavernous eye sockets of one of the skulls, he was 

astonished.

Instead of the robust features he was accustomed to seeing on the faces 

of an ancient human ancestor like Homo erectus orHomo 

heidelbergensis, this face bore a striking resemblance to his own. Where 

an erectus skull had a single, protruding brow ridge, these individuals 

had smaller, separated ones. Rather than a large face and a flattened 

skull, these people had small faces and rounder skulls.

“The face of these people is really a face that falls right in the middle of the modern 

variation,” said Hublin. “They had a skull that is more elongated than most of us, but 

I’m not sure these people would stand out from a crowd today.”

Their braincase (shown below in blue) also seemed to fall somewhere between what 

one might expect in an ancient human ancestor and a modern human, albeit slightly 

more similar to those of our archaic ancestors.

This unique combination of advanced and archaic features suggests something 

profound, Hublin said – he’s convinced the Moroccan specimens “represent the very 

root of our species.”

In other words, all of the Homo sapiens ever found – including those uncovered far 

beyond Africa – may trace their ancestral linkages to the land that is today’s 

Morocco.
That suggestion contradicts the prevailing anthropological logic that our species 

evolved somewhere deep in sub-Saharan Africa, in what some researchers have 

referred to as a “Garden of Eden,” then gradually moved out to other parts of the 

world. Instead, Hublin and his team argue that Homo sapiens could have been living 

in terrain across Africa.

“There is no Garden of Eden in Africa, or if there is, it is all of Africa,” Hublin said.

According to Sonia Zakrzewski, an associate professor of archaeology at the 

University of Southampton, Hublin’s discovery could encourage other 

archaeologists 

to change the way they think about human origins. “It really sets the world alight in 

terms of the possibilities for understanding the evolution of Homo sapiens,” she 

said. 

“It certainly means that we need to rethink our models.”