Volta
Culturec. 300,000 years ago

Emergence of Homo sapiens

Also called: Origin of modern humans

About 300,000 years ago Homo sapiens — our own species — appeared in Africa. The oldest known fossils come from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco.

Cast of the Jebel Irhoud 1 skull — about 300,000 years old, the oldest known Homo sapiens (Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History)
Cast of the Jebel Irhoud 1 skull — about 300,000 years old, the oldest known Homo sapiens (Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History)

Jonathan Chen · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source

The human line split from that of the chimpanzees in Africa some 7 to 6 million years ago. Many human species (hominins) came and went after that, and some, such as Homo erectus, left Africa early and reached Asia.

Skull and tooth fossils published from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, in 2017 are about 300,000 years old: their faces are almost like ours, though the back of the skull is long. Together with the Omo Kibish skull from Ethiopia (about 230,000 years old), they support the idea that modern humans arose not in one spot but across Africa, among groups that mixed over a long time.

Every person alive today descends from them. Most people outside Africa descend from one branch that left Africa about 60,000 to 50,000 years ago.

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The map in c. 300,000 years ago

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Places
Jebel Irhoud, Omo Kibish

Before and after

Later
c. 60,000 years ago Out of Africa

Themes that include this event

  • The Human Journeyc. 300,000 years ago – 1300

    How modern humans, who appeared in Africa some 300,000 years ago, left Africa, met the Neanderthals, crossed the sea to Australia and the ice-age Bering land bridge to the Americas, and finally reached the remotest islands of the Pacific