Thursday, June 8th, 2017

Oldest Homo sapiens bones ever found shake foundations of the human story

Author: Ian Sample
Source: The Guardian (U.K.)
Publication Date: Wednesday 7 June 2017 18.00 BST
Link: Oldest Homo sapiens bones ever found shake foundations of the human story

Stephan: Yet another door into the past opens and rewrites what we thought we knew about our beginnings as a species. As this report states, quoting a senior scientist on the project: “This gives us a completely different picture of the evolution of our species. It goes much further back in time, but also the very process of evolution is different to what we thought." Of course for America's "christian cultists" none of this is possible since God created the world about 6,000 years ago.

Two views of a composite reconstruction of the earliest known Homo sapiens fossils from Jebel Irhoud The braincase (blue) indicates that brain shape, and possibly brain function, evolved within the Homo sapiens lineage.
Credit: Philipp Gunz, MPI EVA Leipzig

Fossils recovered from an old mine on a desolate mountain in Morocco have rocked one of the most enduring foundations of the human story: that Homo sapiens arose in a cradle of humankind in East Africa 200,000 years ago.

Archaeologists unearthed the bones of at least five people at Jebel Irhoud, a former barite mine 100km west of Marrakesh, in excavations that lasted years. They knew the remains were old, but were stunned when dating tests revealed that a tooth and stone tools found with the bones were about 300,000 years old.