Scientists have reconstructed the face of the oldest known Homo sapiens, using a nearly 315,000-year-old skull unearthed in Morocco. The work, published this month in the journal Heritage, offers one of the most detailed looks yet at what an early member of the human species may have looked like. Scientists have created a digital facial approximation of the Jebel Irhoud hominin, whose remains are dated to about 315,000 years ago. A striking new depiction envisions an ancient Homo sapiens featuring a heavy brow, dark hair, and a beard, but it is not a picture of a single prehistoric human. In a new Heritage study, researchers have created the simulated Jebel Irhoud face from the digitally reconstructed Moroccan skull, believed to be around 315,000 years old. The Daily Mail report focused on the photo-realistic impression, while scientists published a plain black-and-white version to indicate skeletal structure. Between the two lies a useful lesson about how we picture our earliest relatives.
Irhoud 1 Fossils Excavated from Moroccan Mine
The starting point of the reconstruction goes back to Irhoud 1, which was extracted from a mine in the early 1960s. The braincase and upper facial bones made up the main components of the model. Then remains Irhoud 11 provided the jawbone, and other fossil fragments were used to fill in the teeth and the upper jawbone. While these finds belonged to the same occupation layer, they were not parts of a single individual. In the early 1960s, a worker extracting minerals at Jebel Irhoud, in Morocco, uncovered a skull with strikingly human features. Named Irhoud 1, the fossil was initially identified as an African Neanderthal variant about 40,000 years old. Later dating studies pushed the age of the find back, to between 100,000 and 200,000 years in 1991 and to about 160,000 years in 2007. In 2017, two studies reclassified Irhoud 1 and associated remains as Homo sapiens and gave them an age of roughly 315,000 years, making them the oldest known representatives of the species.
Daniel Richter and Max Planck’s Institute Researchers Date Remains
Miners at Jebel Irhoud uncovered the first skull, Irhoud 1, in 1961, and researchers initially described it as a roughly 40,000-year-old African Neanderthal. But then a landmark 2017 Nature study instead placed the remains at about 315,000 years old and identified them as early Homo sapiens. The discovery instantly made headlines. Anthropologists were thrilled as the findings pushed the known fossil record of our species back by roughly 100,000 years. It also strengthened the case that modern humans emerged through evolutionary changes occurring across Africa rather than at a single eastern African birthplace. In 2017, Daniel Richter and colleagues dated associated fire-heated flint tools to 315,000 years ago, plus or minus 34,000. Max Planck’s Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) publicly released image and video data regarding the three-dimensional digital reconstruction of the Jebel Irhoud skull, according to corresponding author Dr. Johari Yap Abdullah, a researcher at the Universiti Sains Malaysia and Saveetha University, and his colleagues.
Cicero Moraes Builds Composite Skull Facial Approximation
The three-dimensional model in question constitutes a composite skull, structured through the spatial integration of multiple specimens excavated from the same stratigraphic unit. The MPI-EVA model is dominated by the Irhoud 1 fossil, the original 1961 find, which supplies the braincase and upper face. A mandible from another individual, Irhoud 11, and fragments from other specimens fill the gaps. Irhoud 1 serves as the primary framework. Because no single skull from the site survived intact, researchers built a composite model using several fossils recovered from the same layer of earth. Most of the skull, including the braincase and upper face, comes from a specimen known as Irhoud 1, the original 1961 discovery. The lower jaw was added from a second fossil called Irhoud 11, and portions of the upper teeth came from a third, Irhoud 10. All belonged to individuals found in the same archaeological layer. A team led by Brazilian researcher Cicero Moraes used that composite skull to build the new facial approximation.
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