The First Skull

The skull lay in a barite mine one hundred kilometers west of Marrakesh, waiting since the Pleistocene.

In 1961, miners at Jebel Irhoud uncovered bones they assumed were Neanderthal. The dating said forty thousand years. The classification seemed to fit. For decades, the find gathered dust in scientific literature.

Then Jean-Jacques Hublin of the Max Planck Institute returned with Abdelouahed Ben-Ncer of Morocco's National Institute of Archaeology. Between 2004 and 2017, they excavated twenty-two additional fossils from at least five individuals. The thermoluminescence dating gave a number that rewrote human history: 315,000 years.

This made Jebel Irhoud the oldest securely dated Homo sapiens site on Earth—more than 100,000 years older than Ethiopia's Omo Kibish.

The skulls revealed something else. The faces were modern—thin brow ridges, flattened cheekbones. But the braincases were elongated, archaic, still evolving. The implication: human origins were not a single East African event but a pan-African process.