300,000 years ago today.....

Archeological find that could rewrite the origins of our species.....

When Hublin peered into the cavernous eye sockets of one of the skulls, he was astonished.

Instead of the robust features he was accustomed to seeing on the faces of an ancient human ancestor like Homo erectus or Homo heidelbergensis, this face bore a striking resemblance to his own. Where an erectus skull had a single, protruding brow ridge, these individuals had smaller, separated ones. Rather than a large face and a flattened skull, these people had small faces and rounder skulls.

"The face of these people is really a face that falls right in the middle of the modern variation," said Hublin. "They had a skull that is more elongated than most of us, but I'm not sure these people would stand out from a crowd today."

Their braincase (shown below in blue) also seemed to fall somewhere between what one might expect in an ancient human ancestor and a modern human, albeit slightly more similar to those of our archaic ancestors.

This unique combination of advanced and archaic features suggests something profound, Hublin said -- he's convinced the Moroccan specimens "represent the very root of our species."

In other words, all of the Homo sapiens ever found -- including those uncovered far beyond Africa -- may trace their ancestral linkages to the land that is today's Morocco. 

That suggestion contradicts the prevailing anthropological logic that our species evolved somewhere deep in sub-Saharan Africa, in what some researchers have referred to as a "Garden of Eden," then gradually moved out to other parts of the world. Instead, Hublin and his team argue that Homo sapiens could have been living in terrain across Africa.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/archaeology/skulls-found-moroc...