Jakarta –
A series human fossil 773,000 year old found in Morocco is thought to be ancestor of Homo sapiens. Discovered at a site near Casablanca, this prehistoric specimen could help fill one of the most significant gaps in the human family tree, by providing an African ancestor at the beginning of the modern human lineage.
From genetic data, it is known that Homo sapiens, NeanderthalAnd Denisovan all split from a common ancestor about 765,000 to 550,000 years ago. However, scientists have not been able to find it.
Previously, the best candidate came from the Gran Dolina cave in Spain, which was inhabited around 800,000 years ago by a species that had an interesting mix of features reminiscent of modern humans, Neanderthals and archaic humans such as Homo erectus. Known as Homo antecessor, this ancient hominin has been recognized by some experts as the common ancestor of Homo sapiens, Neanderthals, and Denisovans, implying that the split occurred somewhere in Eurasia, not Africa.
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However, the problem with this theory is that all Homo sapiens fossils from before about 90,000 years ago come from Africa, starting with the earliest known modern humans from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco about 315,000 years ago. Unfortunately, until now archaeologists have never seen anything like Homo antecessor in Africa.
“Africa was quite rich in hominin fossils before one million years ago, but between one million and 600,000 years ago there were almost none,” said Professor Jean-Jacques Hublin of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
“It’s more an absence of evidence than evidence of absence, because we haven’t found any fossils in Africa, but now there is no more absence,” he continued to IFLScience, Monday (12/1/2026).
At a site called Grotte à Hominidés in Morocco, Hublin and his colleagues discovered a pair of partial jawbones, as well as numerous teeth and vertebrae. All combine ancient features seen in Homo erectus with more advanced features reminiscent of modern humans and Neanderthals. But, importantly, this hominin differed morphologically from Homo antecessor, indicating that it was at the apex of a separate but related human lineage.
“What we have is a very good candidate for the African ancestor of our own species,” Hublin said. In other words, it increasingly appears that Homo antecessor may have given rise to Neanderthals in Europe while Homo sapiens descended from these newly discovered African hominins.
“Whatever happened to the descendants of these people, they give us a glimpse of what might have been the ancestral form of our own species more than 400,000 years later,” Hublin said.
The age of these fossils is also very significant, as it places this ancient hominin group in the same chronological time range as Homo antecessor. At the same time, this suggests that they lived around the time our lineage split from our common ancestors with the Neanderthals and Denisovans.
While this new Moroccan hominin strengthens the argument for an African origin for Homo sapiens, Hublin is reluctant to call the fossil a new species. Instead, he suggests that the fossil may represent the final iteration of Homo erectus, which was on its way to evolving into what we now call humans. The study was published in the journal Nature.
(ask/fay)
