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Find Pushes Back Man's Origin -- 'Modern' Man Dates to 195,000 Years Ago

Posted on: Friday, 18 February 2005, 09:00 CST

New dating analysis of Ethiopian rocks in which the partial skulls of two modern humans were found nearly 40 years ago concludes that the remains are nearly 195,000 years old.

These findings, reported today in the journal Nature, roll back the debut of anatomically modern humans by as much as 50,000 years over previous estimates and raise new questions of just when the "sapiens" ("thinking") part of "Homo sapiens" came into play.

When paleontologist Richard Leakey first found the fossilized bones in 1967 among rock formations along the Omo River in Ethiopia, they were thought to be 130,000 years old.

There were two sets of remains: Omo 1, which featured part of a skull and some skeletal bones; and Omo 2, with a more complete skull.

More recently, University of California-Berkeley paleoanthropologist Tim White found similar fossil remains dated to 160,000 years old at a different site in Ethiopia's Afar region.

Teams led by Ian McDougall, a geologist at the Australian National University in Canberra returned to the Omo site four times between 1999 and 2003, and found the area examined by Leakey. They obtained more parts of Omo 1, including part of a femur (upper leg bone) that fit a section found in 1967.

The new research dated mineral crystals found in volcanic ash layers above and below the sediments that contain the early human bones and concluded they are far older than a 104,000-year-old layer of ash, and very close in age to a layer of ash 196,000 years old.

Geologist Frank Brown, a co-author of the study, said the earlier emergence of Homo sapiens "is significant because the cultural aspects of humanity appear much later in the (fossil) record, only 50,000 years ago, which would mean 150,000 years of Homo sapiens without cultural stuff, such as evidence of eating fish, of harpoons, of anything to do with music, needles, even (advanced) tools, except for stone knife blades."

Source: Commercial Appeal, The

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