In a recent blog I wrote about new dates for skulls found in the cave of Jebel Irhoud in Morocco in the 1960s. Originally assessed as belonging to Homo neanderthalensis (an assessment that was soon challenged), a reappraisal published in Nature this year confirmed they were in fact H. sapiens skulls; the great surprise was that the reappraisal determined them to be at least 300,000 years old.

New work done by scientists in Sweden and South Africa, and reported in Science, have now dated DNA obtained from a 2000-year-old Khoe-San skeleton apparently unmixed with Bantu or Eurasian DNA, as having separated from other H. sapiens sometime between 260,000 and 350,000 years ago.

The San are the First People of South Africa, Botswana and Namibia. Indeed, they may be the First People, the ancestral group all modern humans are descended from, or at the very least very closely related to them.

The San are the most genetically diverse of all humans living today. In an episode of Catalyst on the ABC about her research on San DNA, Professor Vanessa Hayes said, ‘There’s more similarity between myself and a Han Chinese than between two San people.’

As reported in Science, the recent work on San DNA involved several ancient individuals, but the standout dates were given by DNA from the genome of a hunter-gatherer boy known as Ballito Bay A. The scientists concluded that, ‘ … our results show that the deepest split among modern humans (the estimated latest time for the emergence of H. sapiens) occurred at between 350 kya and 260 kya.’

Given that the skulls found in Morocco have been dated to at least 300,000 years ago, it would seem not unreasonable to consider the older dates for the emergence of H. sapiens – 350,000 years ago – being closer to the mark than the lower date of 260,000 years ago.

This new evidence also adds weight to the theory that our species may have partly evolved in South Africa.

In the last eight months, we have seen conservative estimates for the age of our species jump from 190,000 years old to almost double that. It’s been an extraordinary year for palaeoanthropology.