This fossil jawbone from an adult hominin, discovered at the Jebel Irhoud site in Morocco, includes teeth that are reminiscent of those from anatomically modern humans.
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These Early Humans Lived 300,000 Years Ago—But Had Modern Faces
Some modern human traits evolved earlier, and across wider swaths of Africa, than once thought.
On a tree-speckled savanna in what’s now Morocco, a group of early humans once huddled near a fire, their stone tools scattered around their campsite.
Now, examinations of fire-baked tools from the site suggest that these ancient people lived more than 300,000 years ago, making them twice as old as previously thought.
The findings, announced in Nature on Wednesday, fill a crucial gap in the human fossil record. That’s because these people bear many striking similarities to modern humans even though they lived well before what may be the oldest fossil evidence of Homo sapiens, from a site in Ethiopia dated to about 195,000 years ago.
The residents of the Moroccan site weren’t quite the Homo sapiens of today; their skulls were
