Kind: captions
Language: en
Several decades after the initial
discoveries came a breakthrough,
archaeologists uncovered another 16
fossils.
All with the same blend of features
and taken together with the old finds, a
fuller picture started to emerge.
[Music]
softly.
[Music]
With each new find, the evidence grew.
These were not some other species,
but homo sapiens with hints of an
earlier ancestor.
But it wasn't until archaeologists were
able to more accurately date the remains
that the final piece of the puzzle fell
into place.
The archaeologists using new and
improved dating techniques were able to
give us dates for these fossils. And
they tell us that these individuals
lived about 300,000 years ago. And that
is mindboggling because we thought our
species was only about 200,000 years
old.
What these fossils tell us is that our
species, Homo sapiens, is a 100,000
years older than we thought.
We are much older than we realized. This
fossil went from being enigmatic and a
basically a mystery to being one of the
most important fossils in our whole
field.
Thousands of miles from East Africa,
where many anthropologists thought we
began, and far older than expected,
these are the earliest Homo sapiens
ever found. And they have forced us to
rethink other finds across Africa
which are painting an entirely new
picture of our origins suggesting Jabel
Erhood
was just one of many emerging homo
sapiens populations.