In 1967, anthropologist Richard Leakey and a team of fossil hunters found the
skulls and other remains of two humans, which they dated to 130,000 years ago
and classified as Homo sapiens, in the Omo Valley of Ethiopia. Now 40
years later, researchers have pushed back the ages of these earliest-dated modern
humans to 195,000 years ago.
The redating is not the first time scientists have pushed back the ages of the
oldest modern human remains. In 2003, a separate study of different specimens
from Herto, Ethiopia, revamped the ages of the oldest Homo sapiens to
approximately 160,000 years old. Using new dating techniques and the inclusion
of new sedimentological data, however, scientists have added another 30,000
years to the age of the oldest Homo sapiens, as published in the Feb. 17 Nature.
“This kind of work helps people understand how science works,” says
Richard Potts, director of Human Origins at the Smithsonian Institution, and
who was not involved in the study. “People think it’s all driven by
discovery, but we’ve known about these finds for a while, and it’s
the evaluation of the original site that is interesting here.”
Read the full story, which was posted online on Feb. 28, in our Web
Extra Archive.
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