Unexplained Mysteries of Archaeology Revealed in New Discoveries

Unexplained Mysteries of Human Origins Revealed in New Archaeological Discoveries. We’ve been telling a story about our species’ origins, which goes like this: Around 200,000 years ago, in East Africa, near modern-day Ethiopia, the first Homo sapiens diverged from an ancestral species, possibly Homo 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 incorrect — or at least woefully incomplete — because anthropologists claim to have discovered evidence that our species’ origins may have occurred much earlier. Their evidence consists of human ancestor remains dating back approximately 300,000 years that resemble Homo sapiens and were discovered 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, and This represents the very root of our species, the oldest Homo sapiens ever found in Africa or anywhere. Whether these remains truly represent the “root“ of humanity depends on what you define as humanity, and there is surprising nuance and disagreement on that point. An anthropological oddity that may be the oldest Homo sapiens skull ever found, these specimens pieces of skull, jaw, and assorted other body parts of five individuals—are not new to paleoanthropology. CHAPTERS: 0:00 The Earliest Homo Sapiens? 5:00 The Split Between Humans and Neanderthals 10:00 The Last Common Ancestor Revealed SOURCES: