Breaking: The story of human evolution in Africa

The story of human evolution in Africa is undergoing a major rewrite

Did scientists discover the oldest Homo sapiens remains on record? Depends on your definition of what’s human. 

There’s a story that we’ve been telling about the origin of our species. It goes something like this: Around 200,000 years ago, in East Africa — near modern-day Ethiopia — the first Homo sapiens diverged from an ancestral species, perhapsHomo erectus. From there, we spread, in a linear manner over millennia north into Europe, and then through the rest of the world.

That story, it turns out, is wrong — or at least woefully incomplete. In two

papers published in Nature Wednesday, anthropologists say they’ve found evidence that the dawn of our species may have actually been much earlier.

Their evidence is remains of human ancestors, dating at around 300,000 years old, that look a lot like Homo sapiens and were found in the Jebel Irhoud cave in Morocco — thousands of miles from Ethiopia.

That’s significant because it’s “much older than anything else in Africa we could relate to our species,” Jean-Jacques Hublin, the director of human evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and a lead author on one of the papers, said. “This represents the very root of our species, the oldest Homo sapiens ever found in Africa or elsewhere.”

Or maybe not. Whether these remains truly represent the “root” of humanity depends on what your definition of what humanity is. And on that question, there’s surprising nuance and disagreement.