Homo nl dating
08-Feb-2020 02:40
Yet paleoanthropologists were aware of mysterious hominin fossils discovered in other parts of Africa that did not seem to fit the narrative.In 1961, miners in Morocco dug up a few pieces of a skull at a site called Jebel Irhoud.Fossils discovered in Morocco are the oldest known remains of Homo sapiens, scientists reported on Wednesday, a finding that rewrites the story of mankind’s origins and suggests that our species evolved in multiple locations across the African continent.“We did not evolve from a single ‘cradle of mankind’ somewhere in East Africa,” said Philipp Gunz, a paleoanthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and a co-author of two new studies on the fossils, published in the journal Nature.“We evolved on the African continent.”Until now, the oldest known fossils of our species dated back just 195,000 years.The Moroccan fossils, by contrast, are roughly 300,000 years old.Remarkably, they indicate that early Homo sapiens had faces much like our own, although their brains differed in fundamental ways.A pair of partial skulls from another site, Omo-Kibish, dated to around 195,000 years of age, at the time making these the oldest fossils of our species.
Resetting the clock on mankind’s debut would be achievement enough.The people of Jebel Irhoud most likely made them for many purposes, putting some on wooden handles to fashion spears.Many of the flint blades showed signs of having been burned.Today, the closest living relatives to Homo sapiens are chimpanzees and bonobos, with whom we share a common ancestor that lived over six million years ago.
After the split from this ancestor, our ancient forebears evolved into many different species, known as hominins. In z'n rechterhand een pijpje waarmee hij bellen heeft geblazen, in z'n linkerhand een schelp, achter hem een vaatje waaruit rook opstijgt.