We’re Older Than We Thought!

For a few decades it was thought that human beings that evolved in the East African Rift valley were a nice round number of years old: 200,000. That was presumed to be about the time Homo sapiens emerged there from our predecessor species, Homo erectus. But a new find in southwestern Ethiopia shows fairly conclusively that H. sapiens are at least 33,000 years older than we thought.

The earliest set of fossils, known as Omo I, were excavated in the 1960s, deep in Ethiopia's Omo Kibish formation. Since that discovery it was believed that Omo I bones were less than 200,000 years old, but now a team of scientists has determined that the fossils were buried beneath volcanic ash about 233,000 years ago. The fossils must be at least that old.

“The challenge remains to obtain a robust maximum age for Omo I,” writes Céline M. Vidal et al in the journal Nature. In other words, this branch of the human family tree might be even older yet.

A few years ago fossils were found in Morocco that led many to believe the earliest H. Sapiens were around more than 300,000 years old – upsetting both the timeline and locale of our early evolution – but some paleontologists doubt whether these fragments are in fact of our species. We’ll have to keep digging.

Photo credit: Thomson Reuters via Business Insider