The arrival of Homo sapiens

The story

A mine in Morocco

About a hundred kilometres from Marrakesh, in western Morocco, on a hill called Jebel Irhoud (“Mount Irhoud”), there was in the 1960s a mine for barite, a white mineral. In 1961 the miners, blasting the rock, brought to light an almost complete skull and other bones. Scholars examined them, noticed the small, almost modern face but the elongated braincase, and considered them much more recent: remains of African Neanderthals, or of late modern humans. For decades nobody thought they were important.

Then, in 2004, the French palaeoanthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin, of the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, resumed the excavations with an international team and with his Moroccan colleague Abdelouahed Ben-Ncer. New datings, based on the light given off by flints burnt in an ancient fire (thermoluminescence) and on other methods, said something quite different: not a few tens of thousands of years, but about 315,000, with a margin of error of 34,000 years. The result was published in 2017 in the journal Nature and has changed school textbooks.

A modern face, an ancient head

The fossils of Jebel Irhoud belong to at least five individuals. The face is small, short and tucked beneath the forehead, with teeth of modern shape: it is in every way like ours. The braincase, however, is low and elongated like that of older species, and the brain, although as big as ours, had a different shape, less rounded. Only later, over tens of thousands of years, did the head of sapiens change towards the “ball” shape we have today.

Beside the remains there were stone tools, bones of gazelles, zebras and other animals, and traces of fire: they were hunters who brought the meat to the cave and cooked it.

An origin across the whole of Africa

Before the discovery it was thought that sapiens had arisen in East Africa about 200,000 years ago, because the oldest fossils seemed to be those from Omo Kibish in Ethiopia, now dated to more than 230,000 years ago. Morocco lies at the far north-west of the continent. How come we find such an ancient sapiens right there? Hublin and his colleagues conclude that our species did not arise in a single place and at a single moment, but from different populations all over Africa, connected by meetings and exchanges. In that period the Sahara was green, with lakes and rivers, and different groups moved around and met. That is why people speak of a “pan-African” origin.

Other remains confirm this picture: in South Africa, at Florisbad, a skull about 260,000 years old shows a mixture of features; in Ethiopia, at Herto, fossils about 160,000 years old are already entirely like us. Studies of the DNA of African peoples today point to dates between 350,000 and 260,000 years ago for the split between the oldest lines of our species. The two roads, that of the fossils and that of the genes, are getting closer.

What does “Homo sapiens” mean?

There is no precise moment when a species is born. A population changes slowly, and the features we call “modern” appear one at a time: the face first, then the shape of the skull, the chin, the pelvis. That is why experts do not all agree that the people of Jebel Irhoud were already fully Homo sapiens; some prefer to speak of “archaic sapiens”. Outside Africa too there are disputed fossils, such as a skull 210,000 years old found at Apidima in Greece, which some assign to sapiens and others do not.

The name Homo sapiens, “wise man”, was given in 1758 by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus, who was the first to classify the human species together with the other animals. Linnaeus had no fossils; we discovered them after him.

Scientists use the word “sapiens” for a species that has lasted about 300,000 years, but for most of this time there was little in the museums of what makes us special: art, jewellery, burials, long journeys. Those novelties, as the following cards will tell, came much later.