ArticleNature2017
The age of the hominin fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, and the origins of the Middle Stone Age.
Article in Nature, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 96 papers.
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96 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Candidate Denisovan fossils identified through gene regulatory phenotyping.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Climate seasonality and predictability during the middle stone age and implications for technological diversification in early Homo sapiens.Scientific reports · 2025Article
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- Inflammation and depression: an evolutionary framework for the role of physical activity and exercise.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Review
- How bipedalism shapes humans' actions with hand tools.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Reconstructing contact and a potential interbreeding geographical zone between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Recurrent gene flow between Neanderthals and modern humans over the past 200,000 years.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2024Article
- New Late Pleistocene age for the Homo sapiens skeleton from Liujiang southern China.Nature communications · 2024Article
- The angular gyrus serves as an interface between the non-lexical reading network and the semantic system: evidence from dynamic causal modeling.Brain structure & function · 2024Article
- A Late Pleistocene hominin footprint site on the North African coast of Morocco.Scientific reports · 2024Article
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- Temporal dynamics of oscillatory activity during nonlexical language decoding: Evidence from Morse code and magnetoencephalography.Human brain mapping · 2023Article
36 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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12 authors.
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Abstract
The timing and location of the emergence of our species and of associated behavioural changes are crucial for our understanding of human evolution. The earliest fossil attributed to a modern form of Homo sapiens comes from eastern Africa and is approximately 195 thousand years old, therefore the emergence of modern human biology is commonly placed at around 200 thousand years ago. The earliest Middle Stone Age assemblages come from eastern and southern Africa but date much earlier. Here we report the ages, determined by thermoluminescence dating, of fire-heated flint artefacts obtained from new excavations at the Middle Stone Age site of Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, which are directly associated with newly discovered remains of H. sapiens. A weighted average age places these Middle Stone Age artefacts and fossils at 315 ± 34 thousand years ago. Support is obtained through the recalculated uranium series with electron spin resonance date of 286 ± 32 thousand years ago for a tooth from the Irhoud 3 hominin mandible. These ages are also consistent with the faunal and microfaunal assemblages and almost double the previous age estimates for the lower part of the deposits. The north African site of Jebel Irhoud contains one of the earliest directly dated Middle Stone Age assemblages, and its associated human remains are the oldest reported for H. sapiens. The emergence of our species and of the Middle Stone Age appear to be close in time, and these data suggest a larger scale, potentially pan-African, origin for both.
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