Article content

Bones found in a cave in Morocco add 100,000 years to the history of modern human fossils. These bones are from “early anatomically modern” humans – our own species, Homo sapiens, with a mixture of modern and primitive traits, an international team of anthropologists, paleontologists and evolutionary scientists report in a pair of papers published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Despite their primitive features, these ancient people could blend in with a modern crowd, study author Jean-Jacques Hublin of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, said in a news briefing Tuesday – particularly, he added, if hats covered their somewhat oddly shaped heads.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Oldest homo sapiens fossils discovered in Morocco with a mixture of modern and primitive traits Back to video

The oldest Homo sapiens bones known date to about 200,000 years ago, but the new analysis shows these bones are surprisingly old: 300,000 to 350,000 years old.

Workers discovered the bone site in the 1960s. Barite miners excavating a hill in western Morocco hit a pocket of red sediment with ancient stone tools, limbs and a human skull, which the workers gave to the quarry doctor. The doctor turned the skull over to scientists. It was a puzzling bone. At first the skull was linked to Neanderthals, a species that has been found in Europe but not Africa.