The African, rather than Eurasian, origin of the A wise man It is today more supported thanks to the description and dating of fossil remains found in a site in Casablanca (Morocco), which provide new evidence that Africa is the origin of the human species.
Scientists believe that the last common ancestor between modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovan hominids (named after the Siberian caves where they were found) lived between 765,000 and 550,000 years ago. The question to answer is where he lived.
discoveries like homo predecessor in the Atapuerca mountain range (Burgos, northern Spain), dated 800,000 years ago, suggested that this ancestral link had occurred in Europe.
However, the Moroccan fossils described this Wednesday in the magazine Nature They reinforce the theory that the hominid that served as a link between Neanderthals and Sapiens comes from Africa.
The remains described are an almost complete adult jaw, a second half of the adult jaw, a child jaw, numerous teeth and vertebrae. All of them were unearthed in 2008 in a cave known as ‘Grotte à Hominidés’, in the Thomas Quarry I site in Casablanca.
The territory surrounding this Moroccan city has had ideal conditions for thousands of years for the conservation of fossils and archaeological remains from the Pleistocene.
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New technologies for fossil dating
The researchers studied, using a modern technology called high-resolution magnetostratigraphic dating, both the fossil remains and the surrounding sediments, concluding that they correspond to about 773,000 years ago, explains one of the authors, Asier Gómez, a researcher at the University of the Basque Country (northern Spain).
Gómez was part of the vast international and multidisciplinary team that was in charge of describing the remains. Specifically, he studied the cervical and thoracic vertebrae found, and compared them with other similar pieces of hominids previously studied.
The key, he details, is that the Casablanca fossils are morphologically different from the homo predecessor found in Atapuerca, which implies the existence of a regional differentiation between Europe and North Africa since the end of the early Pleistocene (between 1.8 million and 780,000 years ago).
The Casablanca remains show a mix of ancient features, observed in species such as the The man stood upand other modern ones, which are found in the A wise man and the Neanderthals.
This indicates that they correspond to the period in which Eurasian and African human lineages began to differentiate at the end of the early Pleistocene.
Gómez emphasizes that the discovery known today “helps to better understand what the common ancestor between the Neanderthal and the Sapiens was like, and to highlight the division between them, which must have occurred more than 800,000 years ago.”
The researcher from the Geology area of the University of the Basque Country emphasizes that the very precise description they achieved of the remains was possible not only thanks to new technologies, but also to the multidisciplinary nature of the research, which included experts in numerous scientific areas, something “fundamental to understanding human evolution.”
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Fills a key gap in human origins
The discovery was well received by the community that studies paleoanthropology in Spain, an international leader.
“This study fills a key gap in the African record right near the interval where genetics places the split between the lineage that will end in A wise man and the Neanderthal,” says Juan Ignacio Morales, researcher at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution.
“The Casablanca hominins could be understood, in general terms, as an African equivalent of homo predecessorin the sense that both would represent evolved forms of The man stood up at two ends of the Mediterranean at close dates, with an anatomy that combines primitive and modern features,” declares the researcher.
The difference is that “homo predecessor (Atapuerca) shows features that place it, overall, closer to the Eurasian Neanderthal trajectory, while Casablanca is interpreted as closer to the African populations that will lead to Homo sapiens,” adds Morales in a reaction to the study.
The new research, experts in this scientific field agree, reinforces the idea that regional differentiation between Europe and North Africa began in the early Pleistocene and focuses on the Maghreb as a key region to understand this phase of diversification.
With information from EFE.
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