THE face of the oldest known human being, whose body rewrote history, can be seen for the first time in 300,000 years.
The Jebel Irhoud remains were a bombshell revelation that’s changed human history with the first man on earth being 100,000 older than experts originally predicted.
They also proved that our ancestors outgrew the “cradle of mankind” in east Africa millennia, spreading across the continent.
Now our oldest ancestors face has been revealed after scientists reconstructed their appearance using the shape of their skull.
Brazilian graphics expert Cicero Moraes, who did the breakthrough reconstruction, described the Neanderthal’s face as “strong and serene”.
He said: “Initially, I scanned the skull in 3D, using data provided by the researchers of Max Planck Institute.
“Then I proceeded with the facial approximation, which consisted of crossing several approaches, such as anatomical deformation.
“This is where the tomography of a modern human is used, adapting it so that the donor’s skull becomes the Jebel Irhoud skull and the deformation ends up generating a compatible face.”
More data taken from modern humans was used to predict the thickness of soft tissue and the look of the nose and other facial features.
Mr Moraes added: “The final face is the interpolation of all this data, which generates two groups of images, one objective, with more technical elements, without hair and in greyscale.
“The other is artistic, with pigmentation of the skin and hair.”
The donor data used was from an adult male with a low body mass index.
Mr Moraes said he gave the skeleton a male face because he found the skull to be more strong and masculine.
The skull is made up of fossils and recreated into one that he said was “excellent and quite coherent, anatomically speaking”.
According to the Max Planck Institute, the Jebel Irhoud remains show “modern-looking face and teeth, and a large but more archaic-looking braincase”.
The transformation of the braincase over time likely relates to genetic changes affecting brain connectivity and development, the institute said.
Mr Moraes said the skull reminded him of another, Skhul V, which was found in northern Israel, and dates to roughly 180,000 years later.
Put beside each other, they tell a huge story of human development.
He said: “The Jebel Irhoud skull is very similar to that of Skhul V, another archaic Homo sapiens.
“However, it also has some characteristics that are compatible with neanderthals or heidelbergensis.
“I drew a series of approximations in didactic images and the result was very interesting.
“We can observe the differences and compatibilities between the structures of the skulls and faces over thousands of years.”
Fossils were first found at Jebel Irhoud in the 1960s and initially estimated to be 40,000 years old.
Revisiting in the 1990s had scientists dating the bones between a whopping 100,000 and 200,000 years old.
Just when you thought they couldn’t get any older, new tech found them to be roughly 300,000 years old in 2017.
Speaking at the time, palaeoanthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin of the Max Planck Institute said: “We used to think that there was a cradle of mankind 200,000 years ago in east Africa.
“But our new data reveals that Homo sapiens spread across the entire African continent around 300,000 years ago.”
Mr Moraes said the remains constituted the earliest member of our species ever found.
He said: “What caught the most attention in relation to Jebel Irhoud is that this discovery placed our species in a historical time 100,000 years earlier than previously imagined.
“It is currently the oldest Homo sapiens, dating to approximately 315,000 years before present.
“The second oldest, found at the site of Omo Kibish in Ethiopia, was dated to 195,000 years before present.”
What are the Jebel Irhoud remains?
JEBEL Irhoud is an archaeological site in Morocco where scientists uncovered fossil bones of Homo sapiens and stone tools.
The Jebel Irhoud remains were named after the site in Morocco where they were found.
The findings pushed back the origins of our species by 100,000 years and show how 300,000 changes in our biology and behaviour began across most of Africa.
Fossils were first found at Jebel Irhoud in the 1960s and initially estimated to be 40,000 years old.
Revisiting in the 1990s had scientists dating the bones between a whopping 100,000 and 200,000 years old.
Just when you thought they couldn’t get any older, new tech found them to be roughly 300,000 years old in 2017.
In recent years, scientists unearthed fossils of several more individuals from the site that were left undisturbed by miners.
Dr. Thomas Hughes is a UK-based scientist and science communicator who makes complex topics accessible to readers. His articles explore breakthroughs in various scientific disciplines, from space exploration to cutting-edge research.
