Eastern Africa’s oldest human fossils are more ancient than we realized

A new analysis has pushed the age of the oldest known Homo sapiens fossils from eastern Africa back to more than 230,000 years.

The remains, known as Omo I, were discovered in sediments sandwiched between layers of volcanic ash in Ethiopia in the late 1960s. Previous estimates dated the fossils to around 197,000 years old. However, a detailed examination of ash from the site and from distant volcanoes indicates that Omo I is even more ancient, an interdisciplinary group of scientists reported in Nature today.

“This work is important in demonstrating that the Omo I skeleton is pretty certainly more than 230,00 years old,” Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London who has also studied the remains, said in an email.

The mysterious Omo I consists of pieces from a single skull that reveal a tall cranium and chin—features distinctive enough to identify it as a member of Homo sapiens on discovery, says Céline Vidal, a volcanologist at the University of Cambridge and coauthor of the most recent findings. The remains were found in the Kibish Formation of the lower Omo valley in southern Ethiopia, an area that was very volcanically active at the time when it was inhabited by early human ancestors.

Nonetheless, the rift valley would have been an appealing place to live during this era, as it was filled with lakes and woodlands. The volcanoes would have created fertile soil and plenty of obsidian rock to craft into tools. The valley “provided resources for the species to thrive,” Vidal says.


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