Where and when were our species discovered? The article 300,000 year-old skulls that look shockingly like ours could rewrite the human origin story, written in the Independent magazine in 10 th November, 2017, seeks to answer this question. According to the article, a sliver of human skull buried deep in a hilly region in Marrakesh West was discovered by a crew of miners in 1961. By the time of its discovery, this skull was nearly complete, and it was instantly turned over to a field doctor by the miners. It is this skull that attracted researchers to this region, and they managed to uncover more remains including arm and jaw bone fragments. According to scientists, these fragments were roughly 40,000 years old, which was quite a number of years since the extinct Europeans, Neanderthals, were thought to have completely vanished.
Forty years later, anthropologists continued surveying and excavating the area, and they made a discovery of remains, which were said to belong to not less than five individuals. They also made a discovery of several flint blades, which were most probably burned possibly by nearby fires. The dating technique helped the anthropologists to predict that the ancient bones belonged to individuals who lived approximately 300,000-350,000 years ago. A closer study of the skulls showed a no resemblance with the Homo erectus because of these had small separated skulls, unlike the erectus’ skull which features a single, protruding brow ridge. Despite the elongated ridge, these creatures would most likely not stand out in a crowd of modern individuals.
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The discovered remains featured a unique combination of archaic and advanced features, which represents the root of our modern species. They are, therefore, quite instrumental in the tracing of the ancestral linkages of the modern day human beings. This discovery was quite important to me, and I chose this article because it contradicts the current anthropological logic that species mainly evolved in the region of sub-Saharan Africa. The article brings forth an argument that Homo sapiens could also have lived in a terrain across Africa.
