The Herto crania (Homo sapiens idaltu)
- Date
- c. 160,000 years ago
- Category
- Science, technology & invention
- Region
- East Africa (Ethiopia)
- Era
- Prehistory
- Significance
In 1997 a team working in the Middle Awash region of Ethiopia's Afar depression recovered the fossilised crania of two adults and a child, with fragments from several more individuals, near the village of Herto.
Dated by argon-argon methods to between about 160,000 and 154,000 years ago, they were for a time the oldest securely dated and well-preserved fossils of near-modern humans. Their discoverers placed them in a new subspecies, Homo sapiens idaltu — 'idaltu' meaning 'elder' in the local Afar language — to mark anatomy that is essentially modern but retains a few robust archaic traits. Beyond their evolutionary importance, the crania show cut-marks and polishing consistent with deliberate post-mortem handling, possibly a mortuary practice, hinting at symbolic treatment of the dead. The Herto fossils filled a critical gap in the record at the threshold of modern human anatomy and remain a cornerstone of the African-origins model, even after older finds at Jebel Irhoud and Omo Kibish extended the timeline further back.
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Related science, technology & invention events
- Ardipithecus ramidus ('Ardi') reshapes the human-ape ancestorc. 4.4 million years ago
- Omo Kibish fossils: oldest known Homo sapiens of East Africac. 233,000 years ago
- Australopithecus afarensis ('Lucy' and relatives)c. 3.9–2.9 million years ago
- Discovery of the Denisovans and archaic-modern interbreedingc. 100,000 – 40,000 years ago (interbreeding); identified 2010
- Domestication of maize from teosinte in Mesoamericac. 7000 BCE (c. 9,000 years ago)
- Domestication of rice in the Yangtze River basinc. 8000–6000 BCE
Further reading
The wider story
A Little History of Science
Warm, jargon-free tour of discovery from Babylonian stargazers to the genome.
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