New fossils shake up the age and origin story of the human species

New fossils shake up the age and origin story of the human species
Our species takes a big step back in time: new fossils of Homo sapiens are ~300,000 years old. 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.”

Interesting reading via New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/07/science/human-fossils-morocco.html

Journal article:
https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v546/n7657/full/nature22336.html

#research #evolution #homosapiens #paleoanthropology #science