New discoveries and new dating methods show that in fact numerous bones belong to modern Homo sapiens, and they lived as far back as 300,000 or 350,000 years.
This latest discovery pushes back the origin of humans to around 300,000 years ago.
The team dated the bones by using the vast collection of flint tools found alongside the fossil remains.
"Until now, the common wisdom was that our species emerged probably rather quickly somewhere in a "Garden of Eden" that was located most likely in sub-Saharan Africa", says Jean-Jacques Hublin, an author of the study and a director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
The site, near Morocco's coast and the city of Marrakech, has always yielded interesting human remains, but they'd been dated to around 40,000 years ago. New fossils are pushing the evidence back by about 100,000 years.
Prior to this discovery, the oldest known Homo sapiens fossils were 195,000-year-old remains found at Omo Kibish in Ethiopia.
The Associated Press reported modern humans could have simultaneously emerged about 300,000 years ago in different spots on the same continent if they were living in communities that were part of a larger network that exchanged and shared both genetic material and things they had learned.
French paleoanthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin poses with the casting of a Homo Sapiens skull discovered in Morocco.
"All data point to a set of derived H. sapiens features suggesting that some aspects of the modern human form began as early as 300,000 years ago".
SCIENTISTS have discovered the oldest ever human remains - proving modern man is 100,000 years older than previously thought.
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Morocco was an unexpected place for such old fossils considering the location of other early human remains. Exactly how and when our species - Homo sapiens - evolved is a mystery. And the skulls, with faces and teeth matching people today but with archaic and elongated braincases, showed our brain needed more time to evolve its current form.
"Thanks to improvements in dating techniques, particularly in luminescence dating, this layer, from which all the specimens had been excavated, is now revealed to be approximately twice as old as previously thought", Chris Stringer and Julia Galway-Witham of Britain's Natural History Museum, who were not involved in the research, wrote in a commentary.
How do we know how old the fossils are?
A facial reconstruction of fragments of an early Homo sapiens skull found at Jebel Irhoud, Morocco.
Dating was done by thermoluminescence, a pinpoint-accurate technology which measures the accumulated exposure of stone minerals to radiation generated by heat from the Sun, a volcano, or a human cooking fire. Around this time, the Sahara was green and filled with lakes and rivers. Inside, excavators found flint tools that were fashioned into spear heads.
Some of the Middle Age stone tools from Jebel Irhoud. Although they tried to extract DNA from them, it wasn't there, Hublin said.
But given their modern-looking face and teeth, Hublin said, these people may have blended in today if they simply wore a hat.
As a young researcher, he recalled, a colleague confided him with the study of a mandible, or lower jaw, from the fossil trove.
Hublin did not hazard a guess as to how long ago the very first members of our species appeared, but said it could not have been more than 650,000 years ago, when the evolutionary lineage that led to Homo sapiens split from the one that led to the Neanderthals.
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