Humans 100,000 years older than thought

HUMAN evolution began at least 100,000 years earlier than previously thought, scientists have found, debunking the theory that the Rift Valley of Ethiopia was the “cradle of mankind”.

The world’s oldest Homo sapiens fossils – which may represent the first known human family – have been excavated in a barite mine at Jebel Irhoud, 60 miles west of Marrakesh, dating between 300,000 and 350,000 years old.

Until now, experts believed that all humans descended from a population in east Africa. The earliest examples of our species were found in the Sixties by Richard Leakey in south-west Ethiopia, dating from 195,000 years ago.

But the new fossils – of three young adults, one adolescent and a child of around eight – prove that early modern humans were established at Jebel Irhoud at least 300,000 years ago.

“There is this notion that somewhere in east Africa there is a Garden of Eden where our species first developed,” said Prof Jean-jacques Hublin, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. “Very early in the process we realised the site was much older than anyone could imagine and we came to the conclusion that the layer richest in hominids around the site was around 300,000 years, so that was much older than anything else in Africa. This material represents the very root of our species. So there is no Garden of Eden in Africa. Or if there is, it is the whole of Africa.”

The discoveries were reported in the journal Nature.