Where and when did our own species, Homo sapiens, first appear?

Our species appeared in Africa at least 300,000 years ago. And probably not in a single spot. That answer is quite new.

For decades, textbooks said Homo sapiens arose in East Africa about 200,000 years ago. The key evidence was the Omo remains from Ethiopia. They were found between 1967 and 1974. The layer beneath them was dated to about 195,000 years.

Then an old, misfiled find forced a rewrite. In 1961, a miner digging for baryte in Morocco pulled a skull from a cave wall at Jebel Irhoud. The stone tools beside it looked Mousterian, a style linked to Neanderthals. So the skull was labelled Neanderthal.

From 2004, Jean-Jacques Hublin's team dug there again. In 2017 they reported an age of about 315,000 years. They also concluded the fossils were early Homo sapiens. The faces look modern, but the braincases are longer than ours. Not everyone has agreed on how to classify them. Recent studies, though, back the early Homo sapiens label.

So early Homo sapiens lived from Morocco to Ethiopia, and in South Africa too. The species likely took shape across Africa, not in one cradle. An older rival idea held that modern humans evolved in many regions at once. In its strong form, that idea has now been abandoned.