A team of researchers working in a Moroccan cave system has recovered early hominin fossils dated to roughly 773,000 years ago, and the bones carry physical traits that place them near the base of the lineage leading to Homo sapiens. Published in Nature, the findings challenge long-standing assumptions about where and when our species diverged from Neanderthal ancestors. If the analysis holds up under peer scrutiny, it repositions North Africa as a critical theater in the story of human origins, well before the better-known 300,000-year-old specimens from Jebel Irhoud entered the record.
What the Moroccan Cave Fossils Actually Show
The hominin remains come from the Thomas Quarry site near Casablanca, excavated as part of the decades-long Moroccan-French collaboration known as the Prehistoire de Casablanca program. Researchers dated the fossils to 773,000 plus or minus 4,000 years using magnetostratigraphy, a technique that reads the magnetic polarity recorded in sediment layers. The dating locks onto the Brunhes/Matuyama boundary, a globally recognized reversal of Earth’s magnetic field that serves as a reliable chronological marker in geology. That precision matters because it anchors the specimens firmly in the Middle Pleistocene, a period when the hominin family tree was branching rapidly but leaving frustratingly few fossils behind.
What makes these bones stand out is not just their age but their anatomy. According to the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, which coordinated the study, the dental and cranial features reveal an African lineage sitting close to the root of Homo sapiens. The fossils are not modern humans, and they are not Homo erectus in the classic sense. They occupy a transitional space, displaying a mosaic of traits that researchers interpret as evidence of a population already diverging from the lineage that would eventually produce Neanderthals in Eurasia. That interpretation, if correct, means the split between our species and Neanderthals was underway in Africa far earlier than many models have assumed.
Rethinking the Human-Neanderthal Divergence
For decades, the dominant narrative placed the human-Neanderthal split somewhere in Europe or western Asia, driven largely by the concentration of Neanderthal fossils across those regions. Genetic clock estimates have suggested a divergence somewhere between 500,000 and 800,000 years ago, but the fossil record in that window has been thin, particularly in Africa. The Thomas Quarry specimens land squarely in that gap. Their age of 773,000 years and their anatomical position near the Homo sapiens root suggest that the divergence was already happening on African soil during the Middle Pleistocene, not later in Eurasia as some researchers have argued.
This does not settle the debate outright. The margin of error on the dating, while tight at plus or minus 4,000 years, still leaves room for alternative readings of the stratigraphy. And morphological analysis of fragmentary fossils always involves judgment calls about which features are ancestral and which are derived. Critics could reasonably argue that a mosaic of traits does not prove lineage direction. It could instead reflect a population that was regionally distinct but not necessarily ancestral to later Homo sapiens. The stronger reading, based on the anatomical details presented in the Nature paper, favors the researchers’ interpretation, but the field will need additional specimens from this time period, ideally with preserved DNA, before the case becomes airtight.
Why North Africa Keeps Rewriting Human Origins
Morocco has quietly become one of the most important regions for understanding early human evolution. The 2017 redating of the Jebel Irhoud fossils to roughly 300,000 years ago pushed the origin of Homo sapiens back by more than 100,000 years and shifted attention away from East Africa as the sole cradle of our species. The Thomas Quarry findings extend that pattern even further back in time, suggesting that North Africa was home to populations central to the human story for hundreds of thousands of years before anyone resembling a modern human appeared. Instead of a single geographic “Eden,” the emerging picture is of multiple, long-lived population centers scattered across the continent, periodically connected and separated by climatic swings.
The Prehistoire de Casablanca program has been excavating sites in the Casablanca region for decades, building a stratigraphic record that spans much of the Pleistocene. That long-term investment is paying off. Unlike one-off discoveries that lack geological context, the Thomas Quarry fossils sit within a well-documented sedimentary sequence anchored by the Brunhes/Matuyama magnetic reversal. This gives researchers confidence not just in the age of the bones but in the environmental conditions surrounding them, including shifts in sea level, coastal ecosystems, and potential migration corridors. For anyone trying to understand how early hominins lived, moved, and evolved across the African continent, that kind of contextual depth is far more valuable than a single spectacular skull.
What Current Models Get Wrong
Much of the popular discussion about human origins still operates on a simplified tree model: Homo erectus leaves Africa, branches into Neanderthals in Europe and Denisovans in Asia, while Homo sapiens evolves separately in East Africa and then migrates outward. The Thomas Quarry fossils complicate that story in at least two ways. First, they suggest that the sapiens lineage was already distinct, or at least distinguishable, by 773,000 years ago, which is earlier than many textbook accounts allow. Second, they place that early divergence in North Africa rather than the East African Rift Valley, which has traditionally received the most attention from paleoanthropologists. If North Africa hosted a population close to the root of Homo sapiens at this time, then the evolutionary “center of gravity” for our lineage may have been broader and more mobile than previously thought.
There is also a conceptual issue with the way models often treat species boundaries as sharp lines. The new fossils reinforce a different view: that of a sprawling network of semi-isolated populations exchanging genes over long periods. In such a scenario, “Neanderthal” and “Homo sapiens” are labels we apply retrospectively to clusters within a much more continuous landscape of variation. The Thomas Quarry hominins, with their mix of archaic and more derived traits, fit naturally into this network model. They may represent one of several populations contributing to the ancestry of later Africans, some of whose descendants eventually left the continent and encountered Neanderthals already established in Eurasia. Rather than a clean fork in a tree, the divergence looks more like a slowly widening braid.
What Comes Next for the Thomas Quarry Story
The impact of the Moroccan discovery will depend heavily on what future work uncovers at Thomas Quarry and nearby sites. At present, the case rests on a combination of dating, anatomical interpretation, and regional context. Additional fossils from the same layers—especially more complete cranial remains—could clarify whether the observed traits are typical of a broader population or idiosyncratic to a few individuals. Fine-grained analysis of stone tools and animal bones from the site may also reveal how these hominins adapted to coastal environments, shedding light on whether access to marine resources played any role in their survival and expansion.
Equally important will be integrating the Thomas Quarry data into global comparisons. Researchers will want to know how these Moroccan hominins relate to roughly contemporaneous fossils in Europe and Asia, as well as to slightly younger African specimens. That means revisiting collections that have languished in museum drawers, applying updated dating techniques, and running new morphometric analyses that can capture subtle shape differences in skulls and teeth. If the Moroccan material holds up as a population close to the root of Homo sapiens, it will force a recalibration of genetic models that estimate divergence times, and it will push fieldworkers to look beyond traditional hotspots. North Africa, once a peripheral player in human origins narratives, is now central to the debate—and the Thomas Quarry fossils ensure that any future account of where we came from will have to start, at least in part, in the caves above Casablanca.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
