Oldest Homo sapiens bones

Diagnosing the oldest members of our species requires us to consider two separate questions: when did our lineage originate (separate from the lineage of our close relatives the Neanderthals and Denisovans), and when did the suite of features that characterize our species today originate? Genetic data suggest that our species originated at least 500,000 years ago, and it is currently uncertain which fossils lie close to that origin. The oldest known fossils of H. sapiens that can be definitively dated are those found at Jebel Irhoud in western Morocco, dated to c. 300,000 years old, as described in the journal Nature on 8 June 2017. These early H. sapiens exhibit many similar facial traits to modern humans (e.g., thinner brow ridges, flatter profile), however their skulls retain the elongated form of more archaic human species; indeed, when a skull was initially found at the Jebel Irhoud site in 1961, it was assumed to be of a Neanderthal or even pre-Neanderthal species. It was only when a team returned to the site in 2004, led by French paleoanthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin of the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology, that further remains, including flint tools, were uncovered and it was confirmed that the Jebel Irhoud inhabitants represent a transitional form of early H. sapiens dating from between 280,000 and 350,000 years old, pushing back the previous oldest H. sapiens by around 100,000 years.

Prior to this - and some palaeontologists would argue, still the oldest known bones to anatomically match "modern" H. sapiens (including a chin, a narrow pelvis and the globular braincase that is missing in the Jebel Irhoud humans) were those unearthed at Omo Kibish in Ethiopia. The bones, which were first found in 1967, were initially believed to be 130,000 years old. But a re-analysis of the mineral deposits and volcanic debris surrounding the bones in 2005 by Frank Brown (of the University of Utah's College of Mines and Earth Sciences), Ian McDougall (of the Australian National University in Canberra) and John Fleagle (of New York State's Stony Brook University) pushed their age back to about 195,000 years.

The previously identified oldest H. sapiens bones, discovered in Herto in Ethiopia's Great Rift Valley, were dated to c. 160,000 years ago.