The course of human evolution never did run smooth. The emergence of hominins on the continent of Africa is full of twists, turns, gaps, and dead ends, which makes it all the more difficult to retrace the rise of our own species.
Today, we still don't really know when or where the first Homo sapiens appeared on the scene, although an archaeological site in southwestern Ethiopia is one of our best lines of evidence.
It was here, in the 1960s, that paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey uncovered the earliest examples of fossils with undisputedly modern human anatomies.
To be clear, older remains attributed to Homo sapiens exist, dating back hundreds of thousands of years. But the line between us and our ancestors is a smear of characteristics, leaving us with the remains known as Omo I as a starting point for what is unequivocally modern.
The ancient bones of this long lost ancestor, named for the nearby Omo River, were buried with mollusk shells, which were, at the time, dated to about 130,000 years of age.
In the decades since, radioactive dating of the surrounding soil has allowed us to push back that age even further to about 200,000 years. And yet even that could be an underestimation. READ MORE...
