Two teams of researchers reported on skull and bone fragments from five ancient humans, along with the stone tools they used to hunt and butcher animals, from a prehistoric encampment at Jebel Irhoud, not far from modern-day Marrakesh.
Professor Rainer Grün, director of the leading Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution (ARCHE), was among an worldwide research team that dated fossils discovered at the archaeological site of Jebel Irhoud, Morocco. "Moreover, it indicates that modern human origins was likely a pan-African event, rather than being concentrated in east Africa". "Long before the out-of-Africa dispersal of Homo sapiens, there was dispersal within Africa". The researchers used microcomputer tomographic scans and statistical shape analysis based on hundreds of 3D measurements to show that the facial shape of the fossils are nearly indistinguishable from modern humans.
The new findings were released Wednesday in the journal Nature. They were dated about 195,000 years old. "They used fire and their tools were made of flint from about 40km away".
But it was the technique of thermoluminescence of flint artifacts which were deposited in the soil alongside the fossils which came up with the age estimate of 300,000 years.
The Director of the Department of Human Evolution at the Max Planck Institute For Evolutionary Anthropology, Professor Jean-Jacques Hublin, said the discovery had a lot of implications.
The fossils from Jebel Irhoud display a modern-looking face and teeth, and a large but more archaic-looking braincase, they said.
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This fits with genetic analysis showing a series of mutations in the modern human lineage, compared to Neanderthals and Denisovans, in genes involved in brain development.
"Well dated sites of this age are exceptionally rare in Africa but we were fortunate that so numerous Jebel Irhoud flint artefacts had been heated in the past", geochronology expert Daniel Richter of the Max Planck Institute and now with Freiberg Instruments GmbH, said in a statement.
Chris Stinger of the Natural History Museum in London said the discovery could help "illuminate how our species evolved".
Teresa Steele, a paleoanthropologist at UC Davis, said the findings "support the idea that Middle Stone Age began just over 300,000 years ago, and that important changes in modern human biology and behaviour were taking place across most of Africa then".
"If there was a "Garden of Eden", Hublin says metaphorically, "it's Africa". And eventually, after all that evolutionary experimentation on the human form, the current form evolved - somewhere yet to be determined.
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