A Griffith University geochronologist’s state-of-the-art dating methods push back the origins of our species by an unprecedented 100,000 years, uncovering the oldest modern human and our deep biological history in Africa.
Professor Rainer Grün, director of the leading Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution (ARCHE), was among an international research team that dated fossils discovered at the archaeological site of Jebel Irhoud, Morocco.
The finds – reported on the front cover of Nature – are dated to about 300,000 years ago and represent the oldest securely aged fossil evidence of our own species.
Professor Grün said the fossils – which comprise skulls, teeth, and long bones of at least five individuals – revealed a complex evolutionary history of mankind that likely involved the entire African continent.
Jebel Irhoud has been well known since the 1960s for its human fossils and its Middle Stone Age artefacts but the interpretation of the Irhoud hominins has long