Home sapiens older than we realized

From the Guardian: Oldest Homo sapiens bones ever found shake foundations of the human storySummary: It was believed that Homo sapiens first appeared in East Africa 200,000 years ago. Over the last few years, remains of five members of H. sapiens have been recovered from a mine in Morocco. They have now been dated to be 300,000 years old!If these results hold up, there is going to have to be some revising about the origins of our species.

I have been thinking and reading a lot about this subject over the last couple of years, and my thoughts have changed quite a bit. In particular, I've come to the conclusion that our taxonomic terms confuse more than they elucidate when it comes to human evolution.Take the above. You say that H. sapiens was believed to appear in East Africa 200,000 years ago, but is that really the case? It's worth remembering that it has at various times been common to refer to neanderthals as H. sapiens neandertalensis, and some workers still do so today. So, by this classification, there were H. sapiens in Europe more than 250,000 years ago.But the article authors are using a more narrow sense of H. sapiens. They're equating it to 'anatomically modern humans'. But this is another problematic term. One of the most obvious features of AMHs is the prominent chin, but looking at the reconstructed skull from Jebel Irhoud in the article you link to, my amateur eye can not discern much of a skull.So it seems what's really being announced here (assuming the reconstruction is acurate) is that there were people in Morocco 300,000 years ago who were not quite like us, but looked a bit more like us than Neanderthals. Which when you think about it is not at all surprising. It's only the arbitrary labels that make it so.I have come to the conclusion that asking where modern humans arose is an essentially meaningless question; now we know from ancient genomes than Neanderthals and other populations in Asia contributed to the modern genome. The more appropriate question is 'how were the populations of Pleistocene humans structured, and how did that change'. This might be a question that doesn't lead to as catchy headlines, but it also makes more sense.(Apologies for any lack of clarity in the above - bit drunk).

The Guardian article mentions two papers published in Nature and links to one of them. New fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco and the pan-African origin of Homo sapiensThe paper is behind a paywall, but the link in the Guardian will get you past it.

Actually that just seems to close the gap between H. sapiens and H. heidelberensis

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Human Evolution

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Enjoy

The oldest "anatomically modern" fossils I am aware of prior to this find is 160,000 years ago:

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160,000-year-old fossilized skulls uncovered in Ethiopia are oldest anatomically modern humans

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"We've lacked intermediate fossils between pre-humans and modern humans, between 100,000 and 300,000 years ago, and that's where the Herto fossils fit," said paleoanthropologist Tim White, professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a co-leader of the team that excavated and analyzed the discovery site. "Now, the fossil record meshes with the molecular evidence."

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It's all good.Enjoy

I'm going with RAZD. The intermediate chin, slightly larger brow ridge, and intermediately sloped forehead seems to be ancestral to anatomically modern humans. Just for comparison, here is an AMH:

Thread copied here from the Home sapiens older than we realized thread in the Links and Information forum.

This was somebody that I had talked to off and on for months, but I told him that he was obviously a Semitic Ethiopian ( he never said where he was from, but Semitic Ethiopians have very distinct and unmistakable faces ) months later during a conversation. This was no big deal at all.But he then started talking about alot of issues ( and they were nothing I really brought up ,they seemed to be taking my language questions in quite a far off direction into human history ) and one comment he made was something like, "supposedly the ancestor of man was discovered in the town I was born in " , and he was really talking about a large ton of historical issues ( I noticed he was wrapping history into a Christian outline though he covered a ton of stuff ) .When I got to talk, I mentioned that he was probably from Afar.He was about as shocked as a genuinely shocked person could be. He was wondering how I knew because he considered Afar a small town that he never mentions to people. He earlier said that he was from a much larger city that he lived in when in Ethiopia.I told him that he gave it away with a small line he threw in earlier and then explained that this discovery is a very important piece of evolutionary history - very much well known. The Latin name was well known ( southern ape of Afar or AustraloPithecus Afarensis ) .He didn't seem to know just how much it is seen as not just another find and not just another so so theory.

I really like that mix of ancient and more modern features.The chin is not as prominent as in a lot of modern Homo sapiens but it is more pronounced than the folks that came before.I'd like to see additional dating, but otherwise this looks pretty good. A lot better than that recent claim out of England.

Omo I is generally considered anatomically modern, and that is now dated to ~195,000 years ago.But my point was that 'anatomically modern' is an arbitrary term, so searching for the oldest example is a bit quixotic.

Indeed. Finding the oldest AMH is like trying to find the youngest adult.

The New York Times has an article on this: Oldest Fossils of Homo Sapiens Found in Morocco, Altering History of SpeciesAdded by edit: I just noticed that the NYT article has a link to the second paper that was published in Nature, and that link also avoids the paywall.Edited by Chiroptera, : No reason given.

So modern man is 200,000 years old.
And modern man started becoming civilised (written language, cultivation, etc) about 6,000 years ago.
So it took mankind 194,000 years to actually start showing signs of intelligence. Once they did a rapid acceleration of technology, wisdom and understanding propelled us to this point.
So for 194,000 years man was dumb and still living out of caves. Man never created written language, they never built any structures or created any machines or tools, nor did they produce any art.
Think about that for a while people. Use logic and common senseEdited by Porkncheese, : No reason given.

Welcome to the fray porkandcheese, Man started showing signs of intelligence when making and using tools. Do you know when that happened?Enjoy

Man was probably using tools from the start.
But man was fairly dumb for a very long time