Humans May Be 33,000 Years Older Than What We Originally Thought

New research has emerged suggesting the first human bones are actually older than we thought, dating back an additional 33,000 years.

When most people think about science, particularly when it comes to human history, they feel as if we know everything there is to know. In reality, we know very little about the history of our human family and at times, scientists are grasping to come up with more information.

Many scientists feel as if humans evolved some 2.8 million years ago. Researchers examined fossils of modern humans and, according to some of their research, they feel that some 300,000 years ago modern-day humans emerged.

Photo: Pixabay/stux

Of course, there is much debate that takes place on this and we are not here to debate it, we are just sharing the findings of the research.

That research was recently published in Nature, and it shows that this is an ongoing science.

According to the research, the earliest Homo sapiens fossil has been found, known as the Omo I. After further consideration, they feel that those Eastern African fossils are 33,000 years older than what was previously considered.

Omo 1 remains
Photo: Wikimedia Commons

It was back in the 1960s when the Omo I fossils were discovered in the Omo National Park in Ethiopia. They weren’t able to uncover a full skeleton but they feel that the remains are part of the Homo sapiens history.

The bones were found between an area of solidified volcanic ash, which has created the rock bridges within the park that it is famous for. After being discovered, they have been studied by many scientists and were originally dated 270,000 years ago.

Photo: flickr/Ninara

Prof. Clive Oppenheimer was part of a four-year study in which researchers looked into the volcanic eruptions of that time period. They would grind down volcanic stone and analyze the content in the minerals and they came up with the discovery as a result. It seems as if the volcanic stone found above Omo I came from an earlier time, some 330,000 years ago. In other words, the fossilized bones would have been as old as the volcanic rock.

According to a press release, an author in the study from Cambridge University, Dr. Céline Vidal, said: “We can only date humanity based on the fossils that we have, so it’s impossible to say that this is the definitive age of our species…The study of human evolution is always in motion: boundaries and timelines change as our understanding improves. But these fossils show just how resilient humans are: that we survived, thrived and migrated in an area that was so prone to natural disasters.”

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

These are the oldest bones found in Eastern Africa that show a similarity to Homo sapiens. There have been other bones found from earlier times, but they don’t appear to have the same characteristics as we do today.

Professor Christine Lane of the Cambridge Tephra Laboratory was a co-author of the study. In the press release, they added: “Our forensic approach provides a new minimum age for Homo sapiens in eastern Africa, but the challenge still remains to provide a cap, a maximum age, for their emergence, which is widely believed to have taken place in this region.” She went on to say that the new studies may actually extend our species age further back in time.

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