Omo Kibish fossils: oldest known Homo sapiens of East Africa

Date

c. 233,000 years ago

Category

Science, technology & invention

Region

East Africa (Ethiopia)

Era

Prehistory

Significance

The Omo I and Omo II remains, recovered in 1967 from the Kibish Formation along Ethiopia's Omo River, were long regarded as among the earliest fossils of our species.

A 2022 study published in Nature revised their minimum age sharply older: by geochemically tying the volcanic tuff overlying the fossil-bearing layer to a major eruption of the Shala volcano in the Main Ethiopian Rift, researchers established that Omo I must predate that eruption, giving a minimum age of about 233,000 years (233 ± 22 kyr). This pushed the East African modern-human record back by tens of thousands of years and brought it into closer alignment with the c. 300,000-year-old Jebel Irhoud material from Morocco. Omo I in particular displays a fully modern, globular braincase and a chin, making it a benchmark specimen for anatomically modern Homo sapiens. The revised dating reinforces the picture of an ancient, continent-wide African origin for our species rather than a recent, geographically narrow one.

Related science, technology & invention events

• Ardipithecus ramidus ('Ardi') reshapes the human-ape ancestor
  c. 4.4 million years ago
• The Herto crania (Homo sapiens idaltu)
  c. 160,000 years ago
• Australopithecus afarensis ('Lucy' and relatives)
  c. 3.9–2.9 million years ago
• Discovery of the Denisovans and archaic-modern interbreeding
  c. 100,000 – 40,000 years ago (interbreeding); identified 2010
• Domestication of maize from teosinte in Mesoamerica
  c. 7000 BCE (c. 9,000 years ago)
• Domestication of rice in the Yangtze River basin
  c. 8000–6000 BCE

Further reading

A Little History of Science

The wider story

A Little History of Science

William Bynum

Warm, jargon-free tour of discovery from Babylonian stargazers to the genome.

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