The oldest Homo sapiens: Fossils found in Morocco date back 300,000 years

A composite reconstruction of the earliest known Homo sapiens based on CT scans of multiple fossils

An almost complete adult mandible discovered at the Jebel Irhoud site in Morocco

The Jebel Irhoud site in Morocco

The oldest human fossils ever discovered have been unearthed in Morocco in a finding hailed as a significant step in the research of human ancestry and origins. The fossils are about 100,000 years older than any previously known human remains.
The fossils, discovered at the Jebel Irhoud archeological site in Morocco, belonged to three adults, one adolescent, and one child who was around eight years old, Reuters reported, citing two articles published in the journal Nature.

According to researchers, the bones are around 300,000 years old, making it an incredibly significant finding as the previously oldest known fossils were believed to be 195,000 years old.

Oldest known fossils of our species, Homo sapiens, have been unearthed in Morocco.
The location of the discovery site is also significant for researchers, who previously thought the beginnings of mankind was rooted in east Africa.

"We used to think that there was a cradle of mankind 200 thousand years ago in east Africa, but our new data reveal that Homo sapiens spread across the entire African continent around 300 thousand years ago.

Long before the out-of-Africa dispersal of Homo sapiens, there was dispersal within Africa," palaeoanthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, who helped lead the research, said in a release.