New Archaeological Homo Sapiens Discoveries

The Homo sapiens arrived to the south of the Mediterranean coast 35,000 years earlier than scientists believed until now.

An international team of scientists have concluded that the fossil of a young Homo sapiens child, whose real age has been unknown since it was discovered in 1968 in Morocco, is in fact 160 thousand years old. 

Scientists have so far believed that Homo sapiens, that has the morphology of the modern human, arrived to the south Mediterranean coast "only" 125 thousand years ago.

A team of scientists led by anthropologist Tanya Smith from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, arrived to this conclusion upon examining the dental development in the fossil, known in science literature as Irhoud 3, which corresponds to a three-year-old child. The fossil, found in Djebel Irhoud, has a rather well preserved jaw bone.

By conducting a microtomographical analysis of the fossil, the scientists determined that the dental development of this child shared the same characteristics with that of the modern day human child of the same age.

The oldest Homo sapiens fossils in the world, discovered in Ethiopia in 1967, are about 195 thousand years old, but the earliest archaic Homo sapiens (predecessors of the modern Homo sapiens) are probably even older, about 400 thousand years.

The first Homo sapiens most likely arrived to Europe about 45 thousand years ago.