Jebel Irhoud: The Origins Of Modern Humans

If you went up to someone on the street and asked them where humans, or Homo sapiens, came from, most of them would say that we originated in Africa, and they would be correct. Bones and fossils discovered in Africa frequently provide the evidence for this assertion. However, a mining expedition in 1960 at the Jebel Irhoud massif some 50 kilometers from Safi, Morocco unearthed a Palaeolithic site that would severely complicate what we know about the origins of modern humans in Africa. Jebel Irhoud is a known site among physical anthropologists. This is because when the Palaeolithic site was found, paleoanthropologists found an almost complete skull. Further excavations in 1961 yielded an adult braincase, an immature mandible, an immature humeral

However, Our Origins claims “the remains of Omo [remains found in Ethiopia] may be as old as 195,000 yBP. If so, they are the oldest evidence of anatomically modern humans” (Larsen, 2017). But as we now know, the oldest evidence of anatomically modern humans is from Morocco and are around 300,000 years old. Science is always discovering new things. This is evident in the fact that books published in 2017 are already seen as out of date. However, even though the book is somewhat out of date, it sheds light on the past of modern humans in Africa. Knowing the background of how modern humans came to be anatomically would help the reader because the article from The New York Times claims, “For millions of years, hominins remained very apelike. They were short, had small brains and could fashion only crude stone tools” (Zimmer, 2017). This is true, but the article skips over the many different species of hominids in between the severely apelike ones and the more modern humanlike ones. By reading not only Chapter 12 in Our Origins, but most of the chapters before, the reader would know more about human evolution and would not assume that humans went from severely apelike to modern humans in the span of a few hundred