Appearances of Homo Sapiens

I love how scientific technologies are helping us understand the earliest millennia of human history ever better. This drawing, for instance, features an artistic re-creation of skull fragments dated in 2017 that have helped to overturn our understanding of human evolution.

Basic questions, such as “how long have Homo Sapiens been around?” And “where did they come from?” are now thought to have different answers. The old idea: we came from eastern Africa about 200,000 years ago. Mitochondrial DNA and fossil evidence seemed to put a cap on the story. But then this skull from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, was re-dated and re-categorized — it was much older than had been thought, back to about 315,000 years ago. And it’s not just human, like Homo Neanderthals, but actually Homo Sapiens. Like us.

The physical similarities of this skull and modern Homo Sapiens include many facial features, but the skull’s braincase was elongated. Rather than being a one-off example, it might suggest that our archaic ancestors evolved our facial structure before our brain structure.

And that’s not all. As anthropologists David Graeber and David Wengrow write, from 300,000 years ago up to as recently as 12,000 years ago, Homo Sapiens had much wider differences in our physical appearance. Developing in isolated populations across the African continent, “strong regional traits developed. The result probably would have struck a modern observer as something more akin to a world inhabited by hobbits, giants and elves than anything we have direct experience of today, or in the more recent past”.

Around 12,000 years ago, with the changing global temperatures and the development of agriculture, more homogenization among Homo Sapiens began. No longer as isolated from each other, our physical appearances are now more similar than has ever appeared in the human record.