Early modern human
Remains from the Jebel Irhoud site in Morocco have been dated to about 315,000 years ago, and they are counted among the oldest known members of our own species. They belong to what scientists call early modern humans, or anatomically modern humans. These are people of the species Homo sapiens whose bones fall within the range of shapes seen in people alive today. Homo sapiens is the only surviving species of its group, the Hominina. The label exists because other kinds of human once shared the world with ours. In Paleolithic Europe, modern and archaic humans lived at the same time. So when does a skull stop being archaic and start being modern? Should the answer come from bones, from genes, or from behavior? And what happened when our ancestors met relatives who were not quite like them?
In 1758, Linnaeus gave our species the binomial name Homo sapiens. The Latin homō means human being, and sapiens means discerning, wise or sensible. Taken together, the name comes close to meaning an intelligent human. A name is easier to coin than to define, though. Researchers found that a definition based on bodily shape would leave out certain living populations. One proposed fix defines the species by lineage instead, as the modern human line that split away from the Neanderthal line. That reading would make Homo sapiens more than 500,000 years old.
Since around the 1980s, the consensus has been to place all living groups in a single species, with no subspecies at all. Earlier habits were looser. A convention popular in the 1990s labelled Neanderthals as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, and it used Homo sapiens sapiens for the Cro-Magnon people of Europe. Some sources still show Neanderthals as a subspecies. Some also treat the specimens called Homo rhodesiensis as Homo sapiens rhodesiensis, although most scientists keep both as separate species. Even the name Homo sapiens sapiens for all living people is debated, because a species normally gets a subspecies only when several distinct ones exist.
A fossil found at Middle Awash in Ethiopia in 2003 sharpened that argument. It lived about 160,000 years ago and was named Homo sapiens idaltu, an extinct subspecies. Accepting it would justify calling living people Homo sapiens sapiens. The biological anthropologist Chris Stringer disagrees, and he does not think idaltu differs enough from other Homo sapiens to earn its own subspecies. His doubt leaves the naming question unsettled, and the fossils that could settle it carry dates that are still being revised.
The Omo Kibish site in south-western Ethiopia produced remains first dated to about 195,000 years ago. Since the 1970s, that date served as the conventional cut-off for the emergence of anatomically modern humans. A more recent estimate moves the remains back to about 233,000 years, and the quoted range now runs from 233,000 to 196,000 years ago.
The Florisbad Skull from South Africa is dated to about 259,000 years ago, give or take 35,000 years. Two fossils from Guomde in Kenya have been tentatively assigned to Homo sapiens, and they resemble the Omo remains. One estimate gives them an age of at least 180,000 years, while a more precise one gives 300,000-270,000 years.
A 2019 study of mitochondrial DNA proposed that modern humans originated in Botswana around 200,000 years ago. Scholars widely criticised the idea. Genetic, fossil and archaeological evidence together point to an origin about 100,000 years earlier, across a broader region of Africa.
In September 2019, scientists built a virtual skull of the last common ancestor of all modern humans from 260 CT scans. They proposed that the earliest Homo sapiens arose between 350,000 and 260,000 years ago, through a merging of populations in East and South Africa. A 2017 study dated the oldest split among living peoples, that of the Khoi-San of Southern Africa, to the same window.
The deeper roots are murkier. Homo erectus lived from roughly 2,000,000 to 100,000 years ago, and the Homo sapiens line is thought to have diverged from it, or from an intermediate such as Homo antecessor, in Africa roughly 500,000 years ago. Estimates for the split from the joint Neanderthal and Denisovan line vary widely. They include 503,000-565,000 years, 550,000-765,000 years, and possibly more than 800,000 years, based on rates of dental evolution.
Genetic evidence from the Sima de los Huesos fossils, published in 2016, shook the family tree. Homo heidelbergensis, dated 600,000 to 300,000 years ago, had long been the likely common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans. The new evidence suggests the whole species belongs in the Neanderthal lineage. It also pushes the split to close to 800,000 years ago, near the time Homo antecessor disappears.
A calculation by Rogers and colleagues in 2017 placed the divergence at 744,000 years ago. In their model, Denisovans separated from Neanderthals just 300 generations after that first split.
Indirect evidence places Homo sapiens in West Asia around 270,000 years ago. Fossil evidence there is firm for 177,000 years ago. Disputed fossils hint at expansion as far as East Asia by 120,000 years ago.
In July 2019, anthropologists reported remains from Apidima Cave on the Peloponnese in Greece. One was a Homo sapiens about 210,000 years old, and another was a Neanderthal about 170,000 years old. The Homo sapiens find was more than 150,000 years older than any earlier one in Europe.
The African megadroughts of a period known as MIS 5, beginning 130,000 years ago, are tied to a major dispersal within Africa and into West Asia. A 2011 study placed the base of today's human family tree at that same date. It described the Khoi-San as an ancestral cluster in southwestern Africa, near the coastal border of Namibia and Angola. Most of the early expansion into North Africa and Asia had vanished by the end of MIS 5, 75,000 years ago. It survives only in fossils and in traces of archaic admixture.
A second expansion began around 70,000-50,000 years ago and repopulated Eurasia. Bearers of mitochondrial DNA haplogroup L3 left East Africa, likely reaching Arabia across the Bab-el-Mandeb. In the Great Coastal Migration they spread to South Asia, Maritime South Asia and Oceania between 65,000 and 50,000 years ago. Europe, East Asia and North Asia were reached by about 45,000 years ago. Some evidence suggests an early wave may have reached the Americas by about 40,000-25,000 years ago.
During the 1990s and 2000s, mitochondrial DNA and the physical study of archaic specimens made this recent exodus the main source of ancestry for all non-African peoples. Studies of Y DNA and autosomal DNA have since backed that conclusion.
In the 1980s, two models competed to explain where modern humans came from. Recent African origin held that Homo sapiens arose from a single source population in Africa, then spread and caused every other human variety to go extinct. Multiregional evolution held that regional archaic forms survived and gradually converged into modern varieties through genetic drift, gene flow and selection across the Pleistocene. Both models start from the dispersal of Homo erectus some 1.8 million years ago.
Since the 2000s, archaeogenetics and population genetics have drawn a picture between the two. The recent expansion out of Africa accounts for most modern ancestry, but significant mixing with regional archaic humans also occurred. The assumption of complete replacement was revised in the 2010s. Sustained admixture took place between roughly 100,000 and 30,000 years ago, in Eurasia and in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Neanderthal ancestry of 1-4% is found in all modern populations outside Africa. That includes Europeans, Asians, Papua New Guineans, Australian Aboriginals and Native Americans. The interbreeding likely took place between 60,000 and 40,000 years ago. Melanesians carry Denisovan ancestry of 4-6% on top of their Neanderthal share. Cumulatively, about 20% of the Neanderthal genome is estimated to survive, scattered across contemporary populations.
The exchange also ran the other way. Eastern Neanderthals draw up to 2% of their ancestry from anatomically modern humans who left Africa some 100,000 years ago.
Ongoing admixture makes it hard to date the most recent common ancestors in the female and male lines, popularly called Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam. The discovery of an ancient Y-chromosomal lineage in 2013 pushed the likely age of Adam beyond 300,000 years. No surviving mitochondrial or Y-chromosomal DNA clearly deriving from archaic humans has been reported.
A study published in 2020 found hints of a ghost. Between 2% and 19% of the DNA of four West African populations may come from an unknown archaic hominin. That hominin split from the ancestor of humans and Neanderthals between 360,000 years and 1.02 million years ago.
Skhul V, an early modern skull, has prominent brow ridges and a projecting face. Yet its braincase is rounded like that of living people and quite unlike a Neanderthal's. Finds such as Herto and Peștera cu Oase likewise show a mix of archaic and modern traits. Researchers are unsure whether the sturdy features of Skhul V reflect mixed ancestry or older traits that were simply kept. In general, modern people are lighter built, or gracile, than the robust archaic humans.
The modern cranium lacks the occipital bun, a bulge at the back of the neck that anchored heavy neck muscles in Neanderthals. A larger forebrain sits above the eyes rather than behind them, which usually gives a higher forehead. Early modern people and some living people still have pronounced brow ridges. Theirs differ from archaic ones because a notch above each eye splits the ridge into a central part and two outer parts. In many living people only the central section remains, and in archaic humans the ridge is unbroken.
According to Desmond Morris, the steep, nearly vertical forehead helps human communication through eyebrow movements and wrinkling. Brain size in Neanderthals and modern humans falls in the same range, and both exceed Homo erectus. Neanderthals had significantly larger visual systems.
Smaller, differently shaped teeth leave modern humans with a more receded dentary, so the chin stands out. The mental trigon, a triangular area at the apex of the chin, is not found in archaic humans. The use of fire and tools demands fewer jaw muscles, which gives slender jaws and smaller, lower faces.
Even the most robust early modern skeletons were less sturdy than those of Neanderthals, with essentially modern proportions. In Neanderthals the lower arm and lower leg bones were shorter relative to the upper ones, usually read as an adaptation to cold. Some modern people living in polar regions show the same pattern. Neanderthal height averages are cited as 164-168 cm for males and 152-156 cm for females, close to pre-industrial averages for modern humans. Contemporary national averages range from 158 to 184 cm for males and 147 to 172 cm for females. The finer-boned skeleton of the gracile type is taken to have emerged around 50,000-30,000 years ago.
Evolution did not stop. Some genetic variation reflects directional selection over the past 15,000 years, well after the archaic admixture events. High-altitude adaptation is thought to have come from archaic admixture, while the East Asian variant of the EDAR gene dates to about 35,000 years ago. The alleles for light skin in Europeans and East Asians, linked to KITLG and ASIP, are thought to be recent mutations since the Last Glacial Maximum. Neanderthals carried light-skin alleles of their own. Adult male cranial capacity varies from 1,200 to 1,450 cm3 today, and the largest averages occur in Siberia and the Arctic. Agriculture left marks too, including East Asian types of ADH1B tied to rice domestication and lactase persistence. The most recent proposed adaptation belongs to the Austronesian Sama-Bajau, shaped by freediving for a living over the past thousand years or so.
The Middle Paleolithic covers the time from the first Homo sapiens, roughly 300,000 years ago, to roughly 50,000 years ago. That later date marks the start of the Upper Paleolithic, held by some to mark the emergence of full behavioral modernity. The term describes a suite of traits: abstract and symbolic thought, planning depth, cumulative culture and complex social learning. Archaeologists infer them from art, ornaments, ritual, music and dance, sophisticated hunting and blade production.
Most researchers now reject both a sudden cognitive revolution and a smooth, steady build-up. They describe a mosaic. By at least 300,000 years ago, anatomically modern humans had much of the neural architecture needed. Early populations were small and fragmented, however, which limited how well complex behaviors survived and spread. Signs of symbolism, art and advanced technology appear only sporadically in Africa between about 150,000 and 75,000 years ago. Widespread, continuous signs became visible once populations grew denser and social networks expanded, particularly in the Upper Paleolithic of Europe.
On this view, modern behavior is mainly cultural and learned, resting on an older cognitive base. The differences between Homo sapiens and other hominins are differences of degree, stability and cultural accumulation. No single cognitive mutation separates them.
The Schöningen spears show that complex technological skills already existed 300,000 years ago, and they are the first obvious proof of an active big-game hunt. Homo heidelbergensis already showed anticipatory planning, a skill once credited only to modern humans. One study links the light, gracile skeleton to more cooperation and the transport of resources. Another ties human brain development, especially the prefrontal cortex, to a rapid acceleration of metabolic change that paralleled a sharp drop in muscle strength.
Progress has sped up. Technological and cultural change appears much faster in recent millennia than in the early periods of Homo sapiens. A massively larger population meant more minds to think of innovations. More communication between groups and the accumulation of thinking tools helped as well.
At Olorgesailie in Kenya, evidence dated to about 320,000 years ago was reported in 2018. It includes the trade and long-distance transport of resources such as obsidian, the use of pigments, and the possible making of projectile points. The authors of three studies noted that this is roughly contemporary with the earliest known Homo sapiens fossils from Africa. They suggested that complex, modern behaviors began around the time the species emerged. Stone tips of javelins or throwing spears found at Gademotta in Ethiopia in 2013 are about 279,000 years old. In 2019, points likely from darts launched by spear throwers were reported at Aduma, Ethiopia, dated 100,000-80,000 years ago.
Blombos Cave in South Africa is famous for rectangular slabs of ochre engraved with geometric designs. Multiple dating techniques confirmed the site at around 77,000 years, and also at 100,000-75,000 years. In 2008, an ochre processing workshop about 100,000 years old was uncovered there. A liquefied, pigment-rich mixture had been made and stored in two abalone shells. Ochre, bone, charcoal, grindstones and hammer-stones formed part of the toolkit. Gathering and combining raw materials from different sources implies the makers held a mental template of the process. Shell beads from Blombos, about 75,000 years old, add to the picture.
Beads and personal ornaments from Morocco might be as much as 130,000 years old. The Cave of Hearths in South Africa has yielded beads well before 50,000 years ago. Ostrich eggshell containers engraved with geometric designs, found at Diepkloof in South Africa, date to 60,000 years ago. At a Kenyan site, shell beads, bone tools, arrows and ochre pigment appear by 78,000-67,000 years ago.
Sibudu Cave in South Africa holds bone and stone arrowheads dated about 72,000-60,000 years ago, some perhaps tipped with poison, along with an early bone needle. At Katanda in Central Africa, bone harpoons date to around 90,000 years ago.
Pinnacle Point in South Africa shows systematic heat treatment of silcrete stone, beginning about 164,000 years ago, to make it flake more easily. By about 72,000 years ago it was common for making tiny microlithic tools. Researchers dated the microlithic technology there to 71,000 years ago and said it evolved over about 11,000 years. The heat treatment persisted for nearly 100,000 years. The site also shows use of marine resources as early as 120,000 years ago, perhaps in response to drier conditions inland. Blombos Cave and Site 440 in Sudan both show evidence of fishing. Nazlet Sabaha in Egypt shows chert mining about 100,000 years ago.
In Southern Africa, the material culture of today's San hunter-gatherers was complete by at least 40,000 years ago. It included digging sticks, ostrich eggshell beads, bone arrowheads etched with individual maker's marks and coated in red ochre, and poison applicators. In Europe, the Venus figurines of the Aurignacian were long the best-known sign of behavioral modernity.
A drier climate between 135,000 and 75,000 years ago may have pushed groups from the inland droughts toward coastal marshes rich in shellfish. Low sea levels meant such marshes lay along the southern coasts of Eurasia. Rafts and boats may well have eased exploration of offshore islands and coastal travel, and eventually carried people to New Guinea and then Australia.
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Common questions
What are early modern humans?
Early modern humans, also called anatomically modern humans, are members of Homo sapiens whose anatomy matches the range seen in people today. The term separates them from extinct archaic human species.
How old are the oldest early modern human fossils?
The Jebel Irhoud remains in Morocco are dated to about 315,000 years ago. The Florisbad Skull from South Africa is about 259,000 years old, and the Omo Kibish remains in Ethiopia are about 233,000 to 196,000 years old.
Where did early modern humans originate?
Early modern humans originated in Africa. A proposal from September 2019 holds that the earliest Homo sapiens arose between 350,000 and 260,000 years ago through a merging of populations in East and South Africa.
When did early modern humans leave Africa?
The recent Out-of-Africa expansion began around 70,000-50,000 years ago. Europe, East Asia and North Asia were reached by about 45,000 years ago, though earlier, smaller dispersals into West Asia are also evidenced.
Did early modern humans interbreed with Neanderthals?
Yes. Neanderthal ancestry of 1-4% is found in all modern populations outside Africa, from interbreeding likely between 60,000 and 40,000 years ago. Melanesians also carry Denisovan ancestry of 4-6%.
How do early modern humans differ from Neanderthals in anatomy?
Early modern humans lack the occipital bun at the back of the skull. They also have a higher forehead, a chin with a mental trigon, smaller teeth and a lighter skeleton.
What is behavioral modernity in early modern humans?
Behavioral modernity is a set of traits including symbolic thought, planning depth, cumulative culture and complex social learning. Most researchers now see it as a gradual mosaic, with evidence in Africa such as engraved ochre at Blombos Cave and heat-treated stone tools at Pinnacle Point.
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