Anatomically modern Homo sapiens appears in Africa

Date

c. 300,000 years ago

Category

Social & demographic

Region

North Africa (Morocco)

Era

Prehistory

Significance

Oldest widely accepted fossils of Homo sapiens found at Jebel Irhoud, Morocco (~315,000 ya). Shows modern facial features but somewhat more archaic braincase.

Related social & demographic events

• Rise of the Yamnaya Culture and Steppe Pastoralism
  c. 3300 BCE
• The Natufian culture and the first sedentary hunter-gatherers
  c. 15,000 – 11,500 years ago (c. 13,000–9500 BCE)
• Uruk becomes the world's first city
  c. 4000–3100 BCE
• Arrival of farming in Britain and Ireland and the rise of megaliths
  c. 4000 BCE
• Çatalhöyük and the great Neolithic towns of Anatolia
  c. 7100 – 5950 BCE
• Cattle pastoralism and early astronomy at Nabta Playa in the Green Sahara
  c. 7500 BCE (onset; megalithic phase c. 4800 BCE)

Also relevant

• Homo antecessor and the earliest western Europeans at Atapuerca
  c. 850,000–800,000 years ago
• The Beringia standstill: ancestors of Native Americans in isolation
  c. 25,000–15,000 years ago
• The disappearance of the Neanderthals
  c. 50,000 – 40,000 years ago

Further reading

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

The wider story

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Yuval Noah Harari

Global best-seller on how our species, its populations and societies remade the world.

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