Researchers Reconstruct Face of Oldest Known Homo sapiens

Scientists have created a digital facial approximation of the Jebel Irhoud hominin, whose remains are dated to about 315,000 years ago.

Facial approximation of the Jebel Irhoud hominin. Image credit: Moraes et al ., doi: 10.3390/heritage9090369.

In the early 1960s, a worker extracting minerals at Jebel Irhoud, in Morocco, uncovered a skull with strikingly human features.

Named Irhoud 1, the fossil was initially identified as an African Neanderthal variant about 40,000 years old.

Later dating studies pushed the age of the find back, to between 100,000 and 200,000 years in 1991 and to about 160,000 years in 2007.

In 2017, two studies reclassified Irhoud 1 and associated remains as Homo sapiens and gave them an age of roughly 315,000 years, making them the oldest known representatives of the species.