HUMAN EVOLUTION

Homo sapiens Emerges

~300,000 years ago

Phanerozoic · Cenozoic · Quaternary · Pleistocene · Chibanian

A skull, a jaw and stone tools from a Moroccan cave, buried around 315,000 years ago, dated from the heat recorded in burnt flints found beside them. The face is already ours; the braincase is still long and low. They are the oldest fossils assigned to our species, and they lie at the wrong end of the continent for the East African cradle the textbooks used to describe.

Why it matters

On a timeline of 4.54 billion years, our whole species occupies the last 0.007 per cent. And there is no birthplace to point at: reviewing the fossils and the genomes together, no moment can be found at which our ancestry sits in one small region. Our features assembled across a continent, in groups that kept meeting and separating.

Dating & uncertainty

The date, 315,000 years give or take 34,000, comes from the heating recorded in burnt flints found with the bones. What it means is the argument: Jebel Irhoud is in Morocco, not East Africa, and its people are only partly modern. The reading that has gained ground is that no single population became us, and that our features assembled across a continent, in groups that kept meeting and separating.

Sources

1. Hublin et al. (2017), Nature · New fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco and the pan-African origin of Homo sapiens
2. Richter et al. (2017), Nature · The age of the hominin fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, and the origins of the Middle Stone Age

Earth history as one day

23:59:545.7 s before midnight

if Earth’s 4.54 billion years were compressed into a single day