World's oldest human species' fossils found in Morocco
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The institute said the remains of the Homo sapiens, which were found in a remote village called Jbel Irhoud, date back to over 300,000 years ago.
Rabat. A team of international scientists has found the world's oldest human species' fossil near the southern Moroccan city of Youssoufia, the Moroccan national Institute of Sciences of Archaeology and Heritage announced in a statement on Wednesday.
The institute said the remains of the Homo sapiens, which were found in a remote village called Jbel Irhoud, date back to over 300,000 years ago.
The remains push back human species' origins by 100,000 years, and suggest humans didn't evolve only in East Africa, it added. It suggests that our species evolved all across the continent, the scientists involved say.
According to Nature magazine, the finds do not mean that Homo sapiens originated in North Africa. Instead, they suggest that the species' earliest members evolved all across the continent, scientists say.
In the 1960s, fossils dating back to the Middle Stone Age were discovered.
Until now, the earliest fossils of our kind were from Ethiopia (from a site known as Omo Kibish) in eastern Africa and were dated to be approximately 195,000 years old.
"We now have to modify the vision of how the first modern humans emerged," Prof Jean-Jacques Hublin, of the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, told BBC.
"It is not the story of it happening in a rapid way in a 'Garden of Eden' somewhere in Africa. Our view is that it was a more gradual development and it involved the whole continent. So if there was a Garden of Eden, it was all of Africa." (Xinhua)
