Morocco fossils likely earliest humans

Find pushes evidence back by about 100K years

NEW YORK, June 7, (AP): How long has our species been around? New fossils from Morocco push the evidence back by about 100,000 years.

The bones, about 300,000 years old, were unearthed thousands of miles from the previous record-holder, found in fossil-rich eastern Africa. The new discovery reveals people from an early stage of our species’ evolution, with a mix of modern and more primitive traits.

“They are not just like us,” said Jean-Jacques Hublin, one of the scientists reporting the find. But they had “basically the face you could meet on the train in New York.”

Coupled with other evidence, the Moroccan fossils suggest that Homo sapiens may have reached its modernday form in more than one place within Africa, said Hublin, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and the College of France in Paris.

Previously, the oldest known fossils clearly from Homo sapiens were from Ethiopia, at about 195,000 years old.

It’s not clear just when or where Homo sapiens came on the scene in Africa. Hublin said he thinks an earlier stage of development preceded the one revealed by his team’s discovery.

We evolved from predecessors who had differently shaped skulls and often heavier builds, but were otherwise much more like us than, say, the apemen that came before them. Our species lived at the same time as some related ones, like Neanderthals, but only we survive.

These included skin patches of the neck, pelvis and tail of a T. rex from the Houston Museum of Natural Science, as well as samples from four other members of the extended tyrannosaurid family.

That group roamed the planet during the Late Cretaceous, which extended from 99 million to 65.5 million years ago, when an asteroid slammed into Earth and wiped out all land-dwelling dinos. (AFP)

Hublin and others described the new findings in two papers released Wednesday by the journal Nature . The discovery could help illuminate how our species evolved, Chris Stringer and Julia Galway-Witham of the Natural History Museum in London wrote in a Nature commentary.

The Moroccan specimens were found between 2007 and 2011 and include a skull, a jaw and teeth, along with stone tools. Combined with other bones that were found there decades ago but not correctly dated, the fossil collection represents at least five people, including young adults, an adolescent and a child of around 8 years old. Analysis shows their brain shape was more elongated than what people have today.

Brain

“In the last 300,000 years, the main story is the change of the brain,” Hublin said.

When these ancient people lived, the site in Morocco was a cave that might have served as a hunting camp, where people butchered and ate gazelles and other prey. They used fire and their tools were made of flint from about 25 miles (40 kms) away.

So where did the fully modern human body develop? The researchers say evidence suggests primitive forms of Homo sapiens had already widely spread throughout Africa by around 300,000 years ago. The different populations may have exchanged beneficial genetic mutations and behaviors, gradually nudging each other toward

‘Trump at odds with Americans’:

Former US Vice-President Joe Biden stressed the need Wednesday to address global warming, despite President Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate accord, and voiced confidence that the US can overcome its current introspective phase.

Biden said that it is “overwhelmingly” in the interest of future generations to deal with climate change, “notwithstanding what some of the folks in this administration a more modern form of the species, Hublin said. In this way, he said in an interview, modern Homo sapiens may have arisen in more than one place.

So if there’s a Garden of Eden, he said, it’s the continent as a whole.

Some experts who didn’t participate in the research called that idea possible, although not yet demonstrated. But John Shea, an anthropologist at Stony Brook University in New York, said it’s more useful to think of the different local populations as a single one, connected the same way a big city is connected by subway stops.

“These are parts of a network,” through which ideas and genes flowed, he said.

Shea said it made sense to find such old traces of early Homo sapiens in northwestern Africa. He agreed that it doesn’t mean our species first appeared there.

“When it comes to evidence for human origins in northwest Africa versus eastern Africa versus southern Africa, it’s a tie,” he wrote in an email.

Richard Potts of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History said the Morocco fossils “appear to reflect the very early transition to Homo sapiens, very possibly denoting the outset of the lineage to which all people belong.”

The site is about 34 miles (55 kms) southeast of the coastal city of Safi, northwest of Marrakech. Its age was determined chiefly by analyzing bits of flint found there, and the authors concluded they were around 315,000 years old.

may think.”

Biden said his first report from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, when he took office, identified global warming as the greatest danger to US physical security — through population displacement and war.

Speaking at a conference in Athens , Biden said: “The vast majority of the American people do not agree with the decision the president made.”

As vice president Biden, supported former President Barack Obama’s efforts to take part in the Paris accord and fight the effects of climate change.

On Wednesday, he also underscored the key significance for the US of European security and the trans-Atlantic alliance. (AP)

Analysis starts for gold mine:

An environmental analysis of a Canadian company’s proposal for three open-pit gold mines in central Idaho has started, federal officials announced.

The US Forest Service said Monday it’s preparing an Environmental Impact Statement for a plan by Midas Gold Corp. to unearth what it says are an estimated 4 million ounces of gold about 3 miles west of the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness.

The area contains the eighth-largest known gold reserves among the 50 US states, the company said, and the 20-year project will generate 1,000 well-paying jobs.

The company also said the project will save taxpayers money by cleaning up previous mining activities dating back a century. That mining left two open pits — one now filled with water that has been blocking a salmon and steelhead spawning stream since the 1930s. (AP)