I originally intended to write about how recent dates discovered for Homo naledi meant that it and H. sapiens, our own species, had only the narrowest window in time to cross paths, but recent finds in Morocco have put paid to that. The announcements of the two sets of dates occurred within days of each other, and demonstrate just how quickly our knowledge of early human evolution is itself evolving.

The new information for H. naledi appeared in three papers published in eLife (here, here and here) in May 2017, and provided more detail about when this newly discovered species walked the Earth, as well as announcing the discovery of a second area – the Lesedi Chamber in the Rising Star cave system about 50 km northwest of Johannesburg in South Africa – containing yet more H. naledi remains.

(For more on the first discovery, see in an earlier blog the interview I did with Elen Feuerriegel, one of the ‘underground astronauts’ involved in the recovery of the H. naledi remains in the Dinaledi Chamber).

Morphologically, the new species contained features that positioned it somewhere between the Australopithecines and the early members of our own genus, Homo; this would place it somewhere around two million years old. Confusingly, however, the bones found in the Dinaledi Chamber were still made up of hydroxylapatite, a form of calcium that takes up around 70% of the weight of human bones. Normally, fossilization results in the hydroxylapatite being replaced by minerals like silica. This suggested a more recent existence for H. naledi.

And the bones spoke true. The new papers give dates for the remains that placed it between 335,000 and 236,000 years old. Since the conservative dates for our own species up to May were 190,000 years ago, or 260,000 if you count the Florisbad skull as belonging to our own species instead of another such as H. heidelbergensis, it seemed unlikely, if remotely possible, that our ancestors crossed path with H. naledi.

But then came the second announcement.

A paper published in Nature in June 2017 revealed that H. sapiens remains discovered at a cave called Jebel Irhoud in Morocco, approximately 100km west of Marrakesh, and retrieved largely during the 1960s, have now been dated to extend as far back as 300,000 years, pushing it way beyond Florisbad and well within reach of H. naledi.

The skulls among these finds are not shaped like modern human skulls; the remains were originally classified as belonging to a sort of African Neanderthal. But the faces are flat, like our own, without the prominent inflated brow ridge of Neanderthal.

Where exactly they lie in the long line of human evolution is not known for certain, but their location and their age suggest strongly that they are archaic H. sapiens and not some other species.

While this does not change the overall pattern of human evolution as currently understood, it does dramatically extend the time that our species has existed, and strengthens the argument that the cradle of modern humanity was indeed Africa.