The theory of origins was as beautiful as a film, but the script was not entirely tied up. The so-called "Out of Africa" model postulates that Homo sapiens was indeed born in Africa and had set off quickly 200,000 years ago to conquer the world. To the point of replacing other Homo species that had been established for a long time, such as Neanderthals in Europe.
Garden of Eden
Two articles appearing Thursday on the front page of the prestigious journal Nature somewhat rewrite the story of our origins: the famous "Garden of Eden" situating the cradle of humanity in East Africa is on shaky ground.
If the ancestor of Sapiens was indeed born in Africa, he spread throughout the continent before setting off to conquer the rest of the Globe, as shown by the work of an international team led by Jean-Jacques Hublin of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (Germany), professor at the Collège de France, and by Abdelouahed Ben-Ncer of the National Institute of Archaeology and Heritage in Rabat (Morocco).
At the Jebel Irhoud site, located between Marrakech and the Atlantic coast, paleoanthropologists have unearthed the remains of 22 fossils. Using the thermoluminescence method on burnt flints from the site, they were able to recalculate the age of the individuals, estimated with certainty at 300,000 years!
300,000 years old
"Until then, the oldest remains of Homo Sapiens unearthed in Ethiopia dated back 200,000 years," explains Jean-Jacques Hublin. "Which is why most specialists estimated the exit from Africa at that period.
But these "points of origin" were above all the result of gaps. "Or rather the lack of archaeological excavations, particularly in West Africa. "Work on the bones from Jebel Irhoud has shown that they are archaic Homo Sapiens, in the sense that the shape of their skull differs from modern humans," continues the Frenchman. "But the facial morphology of the fossils is almost the same."
Thus, the human face acquired its modern characteristics early on, unlike the cranial vault which has not stopped growing. These excavations, which now place our oldest remains in the Maghreb, finally illustrate the "pan-African" emergence of Homo Sapiens, that is to say across the entire continent. The common cradle is therefore not in the East, but must extend across the whole of Africa, which was then an immense savannah.