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Earliest Homo sapiens bones rewrite history, undermining idea East Africa was evolutionary ‘Garden of Eden’

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French paleoanthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin poses with the casting of a skull of Homo Sapiens discovered in Morocco on June 6, 2017 in Paris. Our human species already roamed Africa 300,000 years ago, sporting modern-looking faces that would not stand out in a crowd today, according to research published on June 7, 2017 that advanced Homo sapiens' origins by a hundred millennia. Photo: AFP

Early Homo sapiens roamed Africa 300,000 years ago, sporting modern-looking faces that would not stand out in a crowd today, according to research published Wednesday that pushes back our origins by a hundred millennia.

A groundbreaking fossil discovery in Morocco obliterates two decades of scientific consensus that our forefathers emerged in East Africa about 200,000 years ago, according to two studies published in the science journal Nature.

The findings may also reorganise the human evolutionary tree and eliminate certain extinct Homo relatives as potential human ancestors.

Two teams of researchers reported on skull and bone fragments from five ancient humans, along with the stone tools they used to hunt and butcher animals, from a prehistoric encampment at Jebel Irhoud, not far from modern-day Marrakesh.

“This material represents the very root of our species, the oldest homo sapiens ever found in Africa or elsewhere,” said palaeoanthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.

“Regarding Homo sapiens, what we say is that the dispersal of the species predates 300,000” years ago.

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