Skulls of earliest Homo sapiens found in Ethiopia

The fossil skulls of two adults and a child who lived and died 160,000 years ago in the Afar region of Ethiopia are the oldest representatives of Homo sapiens, scientists will report today.

The finds support the theory that modern humans emerged in Africa less than 200,000 years ago – and for a while coexisted with perhaps two other human species.

An American-Ethiopian team reports in Nature that the fossils, unearthed near what was once a lake on the Awash river, provide the first convincing link between prehuman species dating from 300,000 years ago and the previous earliest modern human remains of 100,000 years ago.

“This set of fossils is stupen dous,” said Clark Howell, of the University of California at Berkeley. “This is a truly revolutionary scientific discovery.” His colleague Tim White, veteran of a series of dramatic finds in the Afar region, said: “With these new crania, we can see what our direct ancestors looked like.”

The researchers found fragments of seven other hominid individuals, along with hippopotamus bones showing signs of butchery and more than 600 stone tools.

“These were people using a sophisticated stone technology,” said Prof White.

Although human ancestry stretches back at least 7m years – confirmed by the dramatic announcement of the discovery of a skull in Chad last year – the first species to bear the name Homo emerged only 2m years ago.

Modern humans are the last surviving branch of a puzzling family tree, and these finds clear up one branch of it. They prove beyond reasonable doubt, according to Prof White, that modern humans did not descend from Homo neanderthalis, a separate species which vanished 30,000 years ago, perhaps driven to extinction by modern humans.

So Afar man, nicknamed Herto by the discoverers, must have shared the planet with his European cousins the neanderthals, and perhaps his ancestor Homo heidelbergensis.

The finds support genetic analysis showing that all the planet’s surviving 6 billion humans are very closely related – and could perhaps have descended from one woman who lived in Africa less than 200,000 years ago: the so-called “African Eve”.

The discovery also raises questions about the evolution of modern behaviour. Humans spent more than 100,000 years as nomadic hunter- gatherers. Art, pottery, sophisticated ornaments and other evidence of modernity emerged in Europe in the last ice age – but it took another 50,000 years before the arrival of agriculture, cities, metal tools, writing, geometry, weapons of mass destruction and mobile telephones.

Herto, 160,000 years ago, was at the start of the long march to modernity. He may not have had sophisticated language, but he and his companions were a co-operative group.