Around 770,000 years ago, a small windswept cave overlooked grassy plains and trees in what today is southwest Casablanca in Morocco. The area abounded with gazelle, hyena, antelope, mongoose, bears, the now-extinct giant gelada baboons—and a hitherto unknown group of early humans.
In a paper published today in the journal Nature, researchers report the discovery of new hominin fossils from this cave, called Grotte à Hominidés, that date back to a critical period of human evolution when the ancestor to Homo sapiens was just beginning to split and diversify into different lineages that would later become Neanderthals and Denisovans. The remains strike at the heart of a debate about where our earliest ancestors come from, strongly pointing the finger toward northwest Africa as a contender for our original home.
“The fossils add a new piece to the puzzle of the origin of Homo sapiens,” says José María Bermúdez de Castro, a paleoanthropologist at the National Human Evolution Research Center in Spain who was not involved with the study. “This new research is excellent.”
Unearthing enigmatic ancestors
Prior genetic evidence suggested the earliest ancestor to modern Homo sapiens lived sometime between 765,000 to 550,000 years ago, but physical data from this time period are scarce. Bermúdez de Castro and his colleagues discovered the previous contender for our oldest common ancestor, which they named Homo antecessor, in Atapuerca, Spain and estimated it to be between 950,000 and 770,000 years old. The find led some to wonder if Homo sapiens developed the anatomical traits that set them apart from their evolutionary cousins in Europe, not Africa. But others consider that scenario less plausible because all uncontroversial early Homo sapiens specimens come from Africa.
(Homo antecessor may have also dabbled in cannibalism.)
The new work focuses on a handful of fossil specimens unearthed over the past three decades from a site with a rich hominin history known as Thomas Quarry—made famous in 1969 when an amateur collector uncovered a human mandible fragment within Grotte à Hominidés. The quarry includes a 1.3-million-year-old archaeological site that contains the first definitive evidence of human stone toolmaking in northwest Africa, as well as a younger area that includes Grotte à Hominidés where the newer fossils were found. In total, the new remains include two jaw fragments from adults, one from a child, and several associated teeth and vertebrae.
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