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Thursday, 06/08/2017 1:39:18 PM

Thursday, June 08, 2017 1:39:18 PM

315,000-Year-Old Fossils From Morocco Could Be Earliest Recorded Homo Sapiens

Paleoanthropologists carefully excavate the remains of five ancient individuals, discovered in what was once a large cave. The cave at what's now known as the Jebel Irhoud site in Morocco became buried, over the eons, under layers of rock and sediment.

Virtual palaeoanthropology is able to correct distortions and fragmentations of fossil specimens. This reconstruction of the mandible from the Morocco specimen known as Irhoud 11 allows its comparison with archaic hominins, such as Neandertals, as well as with early forms of anatomically modern humans.

A composite reconstruction of what its discovers believe is the the earliest known Homo sapien fossil (from Jebel Irhoud), based on scans of multiple specimens. The virtual imprint of the braincase (blue) indicates that brain shape, and possibly brain function, evolved within the Homo sapien lineage, the scientists say.
June 7, 2017
[...]
Archaic forms of humans — other, earlier species of Homo — emerged more than a million years ago. Exactly how and when our species — Homo sapiens — evolved is a mystery. Up to now, the oldest known bones widely recognized as Homo sapiens were from people who lived in East Africa about 200,000 years ago. The new discovery in Morocco would push the date for the emergence of our species back another 100,000 years.
[...]
What is clear, now more than ever, is that humanity's ancestors, and eventually early forms of "us," were popping up all over Africa. They evolved in eastern Africa, southern Africa and now, apparently, northern Africa. And it's increasingly evident that these ancestors moved all over the continent, swapping tool technology as well as genes.
"If there was a 'Garden of Eden'," Hublin says metaphorically, "it's Africa. So the Garden of Eden is the size of Africa." And eventually, after all that evolutionary experimentation on the human form, the current form evolved — somewhere yet to be determined.
http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/06/07/531804528/315-000-year-old-fossils-from-morocco-could-be-earliest-recorded-homo-sapiens

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New fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco and the pan-African origin of Homo sapiens
Nature 546, 289–292 (08 June 2017)
doi:10.1038/nature22336
Published online 07 June 2017
Abstract
Fossil evidence points to an African origin of Homo sapiens from a group called either H. heidelbergensis or H. rhodesiensis. However, the exact place and time of emergence of H. sapiens remain obscure because the fossil record is scarce and the chronological age of many key specimens remains uncertain. In particular, it is unclear whether the present day ‘modern’ morphology rapidly emerged approximately 200 thousand years ago (ka) among earlier representatives of H. sapiens1 or evolved gradually over the last 400 thousand years2. Here we report newly discovered human fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, and interpret the affinities of the hominins from this site with other archaic and recent human groups. We identified a mosaic of features including facial, mandibular and dental morphology that aligns the Jebel Irhoud material with early or recent anatomically modern humans and more primitive neurocranial and endocranial morphology. In combination with an age of 315?±?34 thousand years (as determined by thermoluminescence dating)3, this evidence makes Jebel Irhoud the oldest and richest African Middle Stone Age hominin site that documents early stages of the H. sapiens clade in which key features of modern morphology were established. Furthermore, it shows that the evolutionary processes behind the emergence of H. sapiens involved the whole African continent.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v546/n7657/full/nature22336.html

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Oldest Homo sapiens fossil claim rewrites our species' history

Fossils of early members of Homo sapiens found in Morocco (left) display a more elongated skull shape than do modern humans (right).
Remains from Morocco dated to 315,000 years ago push back our species' origins by 100,000 years — and suggest we didn't evolve only in East Africa.
07 June 2017 Corrected: 08 June 2017
https://www.nature.com/news/oldest-homo-sapiens-fossil-claim-rewrites-our-species-history-1.22114 [commenting currently unavailable]

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