Out of Africa and Early Human Dispersal

Fossil evidence for the emergence of Homo sapiens has pushed steadily deeper into the past. In 2017, a team led by Jean-Jacques Hublin of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology announced, in the journal Nature (vol. 546), that skeletal remains and stone tools from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, first excavated in the 1960s, dated through thermoluminescence analysis of burned flints to approximately 315,000 years ago - roughly twice as old as the previous estimate for the site. This redating displaced Omo Kibish in Ethiopia, whose remains were first found by Richard Leakey's team in 1967 and redated by McDougall et al. in 2005 to about 195,000 years, as the earliest secure Homo sapiens fossil, and supported a "pan-African" model of human origins, in which early Homo sapiens traits emerged across multiple regions of Africa in a connected population rather than in a single localized cradle.