The human species is thought to have arisen hundreds of thousands of years ago. There are a lot of incredible facts about our species, but there are also questions left unanswered. The good news is that scientists never seem to take a break, as they always look for answers.
Richard Leakey, a paleoanthropologist, discovered about four decades ago the earliest fossils that clearly show the anatomy of modern humans. In other words, the ancestor known as Omo I represents the starting point of what is the modern human. ScienceAlert.com informs that while the initial dating was that the fossil is about 130,000 years old, the new calculations indicate that it’s at least 200,000 years old. Radioactive dating of the surrounding soil shed new light upon the mystery.
An exciting discovery
Céline Vidal, a volcanologist from Cambridge University, declared:
The fossils were found in a sequence, below a thick layer of volcanic ash that nobody had managed to date with radiometric techniques because the ash is too fine-grained,
When I received the results and found out that the oldest Homo sapiens from the region was older than previously assumed, I was really excited.
According to Wikipedia, the Omo remains represent a collection of hominin bones that were discovered near the Omo River from south-western Ethiopia by a team from the Kenya National Museums that was directed by Richard Leakey and others. The bones include various parts of the human body, including four jaws, two parts of skulls, and about two hundred teeth. Both specimens Omo I and Omo II are anatomically modern humans. However, they are different when it comes to morphological traits.
The new study was published in Nature.
