Egypt: a 4,200-year-old funerary temple for a queen discovered
Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities has revealed details of the latest landmark discoveries to emerge from the Saqqara necropolis, south of Cairo. The vast burial grounds sit in what was once Memphis, the capital of ancient Egypt.
The UNESCO World Heritage Site is home to more than a dozen pyramids, including Egypt’s oldest, the Pyramid of Djoser.
The site has yielded thousands of artifacts over decades of excavation, but among the biggest rewards for Egyptologists in this latest round of discoveries was the identity of a queen who died around 4,200 years ago.
Her tomb was discovered at a site adjacent to the pyramid of King Teti, the first pharaoh of the Sixth Dynasty of Egypt’s the Old Kingdom, the era between about 2680 and 2180 BC known as the Age of the Pyramids.
“The excavation started in 2010 when we discovered a pyramid of a queen next to the pyramid of King Teti, but we didn’t find a name inside the pyramid to tell us who the pyramid belonged to,” leading Egyptologist and former minister of antiquities Dr. Zahi Hawass told CBS News.
A sarcophagus is displayed during the official announcement of the discovery by an Egyptian archaeological mission of a new trove of treasures at Egypt’s Saqqara necropolis south of Cairo, on January 17, 2021. The discovery includes the funerary temple of Queen Neit, wife of King Teti, as well as burial shafts, coffins, and mummies dating back 3,000 years to the New Kingdom.
About a month ago they discovered a funerary temple, and now researchers finally have a name for the ancient female monarch: Queen Neit, the wife of King Teti. Her name was finally found, carved on a wall in the temple, and also written on a fallen obelisk in the entrance to her tomb.
Egyptologist Dr. Zahi Hawass poses during an event announcing the discovery by the archaeological mission he leads of a new trove of treasures at Egypt’s Saqqara necropolis, south of Cairo, on January 17, 2021.
“I’d never heard of this queen before. Therefore, we add an important piece to Egyptian history, about this queen,” said Hawass, who heads the archaeological mission. He said the recent discoveries would help “rewrite” the history of ancient Egypt.
His team also discovered 52 burial shafts, each around 30 to 40 feet deep, inside of which they found have more than 50 wooden coffins dating back to the New Kingdom, around 3,000 years ago.
Unearthed adorned wooden sarcophagi are displayed during the official announcement of the discovery by an Egyptian archaeological mission of a new trove of treasures at Egypt’s Saqqara necropolis south of Cairo, on January 17, 2021.
“Actually, this morning we found another shaft,” Hawass told CBS News on Monday. “Inside the shaft, we found a large limestone sarcophagus. This is the first time we’ve discovered a limestone sarcophagus inside the shafts. We found another one that we’re going to open a week from now.”
The team also found a papyrus about 13 feet long and three feet wide, on which Chapter 17 of the Book of the Dead is written in hieroglyphics, with the name of its owner recorded on it. The Book of the Dead is an ancient manuscript that explains how to navigate through the afterlife to reach the field of the Aaru — paradise, to ancient Egyptians.
The remains of a papyrus, bearing Chapter 17 of the Book of the Dead, found in a burial shaft at the Saqqara necropolis in Egypt are displayed on tables in an image provided by the Ministry of Antiquities.
Hawass said it was the first time such a large papyrus had been discovered inside a burial shaft.
Other finds from the site include numerous wooden funerary masks, a shrine dedicated to the god Anubis (Guardian of the Cemetery), statues of Anubis, and games that were buried with the dead, to keep them busy in the afterlife. One of them was a game called “Twenty,” found with its owner’s name still visibly written on it.
Another game, called “Senet” (cross), was found in the shafts. It’s similar to chess, but if the deceased player wins, they go safely into the afterlife.
The cache of embalming materials unearthed in Abu Sir
The archaeological mission of the Czech Institute of Egyptology discovered a cache of mummification materials during archaeological excavations inside a group of burial wells dating back to the 26th Dynasty and located in the western part of the Abu Sir cemetery.
Part of the discovery – Min. of Tourism & Antiquities
Secretary-General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities Mostafa Waziri explained that this cache was found inside a huge well measuring 5.3 x 5.3 meters and of depth exceeding 14 meters.
The cache contains unique embalming materials, consisting of 370 large pottery vessels divided into 14 groups, each group containing from 7 to 52 pots.
The discovered well – Min. of Tourism & Antiquities
The discovered well – Min. of Tourism & Antiquities
Waziri added that these pots contain remnants of materials that were used during the mummification process.
Waziri further indicated that in the upper group, four empty limestone canopic pots engraved with hieroglyphic texts in the name of their owner, a person named Wahibre, were found.
Part of the discovery – Min. of Tourism & Antiquities
For his part, Miroslav Barta, head of the mission, noted, “the 2021 season was part of a long-term project aimed at uncovering antiquities dating back to an era when ancient Egyptian society was looking for new ways to preserve the unique Egyptian identity.
The tombs of Abu Sir, which were built in a similar way to the famous pyramid of Djoser, the most famous king of the Third Dynasty of the Old Kingdom, played a major role in showing the unique Egyptian culture, which was expressed by the Egyptian eras in that period.”
Moreover, Deputy Director of the Czech Mission Mohammad Megahid confirmed that archaeological excavations will continue in the area through 2022.
At the same time, studies and analysis of the contents of the pottery vessels will be started using modern scientific methods.
Hieroglyphic Texts Discovered on Coffins Believed to Contain Mummies of Birds and Guts
Three burial shafts believed to contain mummified birds were discovered near Cairo. The coffins, which are covered in ancient hieroglyphic texts, were found in the Abusir necropolis, a large cemetery.
The discovery was made after authorities received reports of illegal excavations in the area, according to Ahram Online.
In additional to 38 carved ceramic pots, the committee discovered that the graves held four wooden coffins. Though in poor condition, hieroglyphic texts are still visible on their surfaces.
An ancient Egyptian mummy depicting an ibis on display at the Brooklyn Museum. Four coffins believed to contain mummies of birds were recently discovered near Cairo.
Sabri Farag, the director-general of the Saqqara Necropolis and leader of the excavation committee, said that one of the texts featured a cartouche—an oval tablet bearing text specifically associated with royalty—of King Ptolemy IV, according to Ahram Online.
The hieroglyphs were too badly degraded for experts to decipher anything further, but additional studies are being planned to reveal more, according to Ahram Online.
Supreme Council of Antiquities secretary-general Mostafa Waziri said that an excavation committee was formed to investigate the site as quickly as possible following reports of illegal grave-digging, according to Ahram Online.
The coffins are believed to contain four mummified bodies, but not of humans—of birds. Also found in the coffins were three of the mummies’ stomachs, wrapped protectively in linen.
Removal of internal organs during the mummification process was common practice, according to the Smithsonian Institution. In addition to removing moisture from the body, embalming involves taking out anything that would rot especially quickly, like organs.
Animal mummification was also common practice in ancient Egypt. While the precise purpose of mummifying creatures like dogs, cats, and birds remains unknown, ancient Egyptians viewed animals as of equal importance to humans, according to The New York Times.
For instance, a mummified ibis—a sacred bird with a long hooked beak—would have been preserved because that bird was associated with the deity Thoth, the god of magic and wisdom, according to The New York Times.
And yet, a CT scan of one such mummy revealed “just a bundle of feathers” inside. A separate scan of a different bird mummy revealed that it really did contain a bird—which had choked to death on a mouse, according to National Geographic.
All of which is to say that these newly discovered mummies might be, quite literally, full of surprises.
Archaeologists Identify Mummified Legs as Queen Nefertari’s
A team of international archaeologists believe a pair of mummified legs on display in an Italian museum may belong to Egyptian Queen Nefertari — the favourite wife of the pharaoh Ramses II.
The team, which included Dr Stephen Buckley and Professor Joann Fletcher from the University of York’s Department of Archaeology, used radiocarbon dating, anthropology, palaeopathology, genetics and chemical analysis to identify the remains.
They conclude that “the most likely scenario is that the mummified knees truly belong to Queen Nefertari.”
Queen Nefertari’s knees.
As the favourite wife of the pharaoh Ramses II, Nefertari was provided with a beautifully decorated tomb in the Valley of the Queens to which Professor Fletcher was recently given access.
Although plundered in ancient times, the tomb, first excavated by Italian archaeologists in 1904, still contained objects which were sent to the Egyptian Museum in Turin.
This included a pair of mummified legs which could have been part of a later interment as was often the case in other tombs in the region.
But as the legs had never been scientifically investigated, it was decided to undertake the recent study to find out if the legs could actually represent all that remained of one of Egypt’s most legendary queens.
The study, published in the journal Plos One, revealed that the legs are those of an adult woman of about 40 years of age.
Dr Buckley’s chemical analysis also established that the materials used to embalm the legs are consistent with 13th Century BC mummification traditions, which when taken in conjunction with the findings of the other specialists involved, led to the identification.
Professor Fletcher said: “This has been the most exciting project to be part of, and a great privilege to be working alongside some of the world’s leading experts in this area.
“Both Stephen and myself have a long history studying Egypt’s royal mummies, and the evidence we’ve been able to gather about Nefertari’s remains not only complements the research we’ve been doing on the queen and her tomb but really does allow us to add another piece to the jigsaw of what is actually known about Egyptian mummification.”
Egypt Archaeologists Discover 18,000 Notes Describing Lives of Ancient Civilisation
Archaeologists from the Institute for Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of Tübingen and the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities have unearthed a collection of more than 18,000 ostraca (inscribed pottery fragments) in the ancient Egyptian town of Athribis, near to the modern city of Sohag, Egypt. The artefacts document names, purchases of food and everyday objects, and even writings from a school.
Ostraca (plural for ostracon) are pottery fragments used as surfaces for writing or drawing.
They were used as notepads for private letters, laundry lists, records of purchases, and copies of literary works.
An ostracon with a child’s drawing.
By extension, the term is applied to flakes of limestone which were employed for similar purposes.
“In ancient times, ostraca were used in large quantities as writing material, inscribed with ink and a reed or hollow stick (calamus),” explained Professor Christian Leitz, a researcher with the Institute for Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of Tübingen, and his colleagues from the Athribis Project, an archaeological and philological endeavour investigating the ancient Egyptian town of Athribis.
The archaeologists uncovered a collection of more than 18,000 ostraca in the ruins of Athribis.
Fragment of a school text with a bird alphabet in Hieratic. On the right, the name of the bird, and on the left, the numbers from 5 to 8, which reflect the position of the letters in the list.
“These ostraca provide a variety of insights into the everyday life of Athribis,” they said.
“Around 80% of the potsherds are inscribed in Demotic, the common administrative script in the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, which developed from Hieratic after 600 BCE.”
“Among the second most common finds are ostraca with Greek script, but we also came across inscriptions in Hieratic, hieroglyphic and — more rarely — Coptic and Arabic scripts.”
Pupils had to write lines.
The researchers also found pictorial ostraca with various figurative representations, including animals such as scorpions and swallows, humans, deities from the nearby temple, even geometric figures.
“The contents of the ostraca vary from lists of various names to accounts of different foods and items of daily use,” they said.
“A surprisingly large number of sherds could be assigned to an ancient school.”
“There are lists of months, numbers, arithmetic problems, grammar exercises and a ‘bird alphabet’ — each letter was assigned a bird whose name began with that letter.”
Receipt for bread in Demotic; the loaves are distributed in multiples of 5 (often 5, sometimes 10 or 20); many of the buyers are women.
“Several hundreds of ostraca also contain writing exercises that we classified as punishment,” they added.
“They are inscribed with the same one or two characters each time, both on the front and back.”
Autopsy Unmasks King Tut’s True Face, and It Isn’t Pretty
King Tutankhamun was a hobbled, weak teenager with a cleft palate and club foot. And he probably has his parents to blame. The mother and father of the legendary boy pharaoh were actually brother and sister. The startling discovery was revealed today by a team led by Egyptian antiquities expert Dr Zahi Hawass. They identified the mummies of both his parents and both of his grandparents by studying DNA samples over two years.
For a long time, there were strong suspicions that he was murdered because he had a hole in the back of his head. But this is now believed to be due to the mummification process and scientists think the new research points to him dying from complications from a broken leg exacerbated by malaria.
The revelations are in stark contrast to the popular image of a graceful boy-king as portrayed by the dazzling funerary artefacts in his tomb that later introduced much of the world to the glory of ancient Egypt.
Meet the family: Scientists have for the first time – with the help of DNA – been able to identify these skulls as belonging to King Tut’s father Akhenaten (left) and mother (right). They were also brother and sister
King Tut has fascinated the world ever since his ancient tomb was unearthed by the British archaeologist Dr Howard Carter in the Valley of the Kings in 1922. The treasure in his tomb included a 24.2lb solid gold death mask encrusted with lapis lazuli and semi-precious stones. Rumours of a curse arose after Dr Carter’s benefactor Lord Carnarvon died suddenly a few months after the tomb was opened, even though Dr Carter went on to live another 16 years.
King Tut was known to be the son of the ‘heretic’ pharaoh Akhenaten, who tried to reform the Egyptian religion during his rule. But the identity of his mother had been shrouded in mystery – until now. The fact that his mother and father were brother and sister may seem bizarre today but incest was rife among the boy king’s family because pharaohs were believed to be descended from the gods.
Therefore it was an acceptable way of retaining the sacred bloodline. King Tut’s own wife Ankhesenpaaten, was his half-sister as they shared the same father. They were married when he was just ten. But Dr Hawass’ team found generations of inbreeding took their toll on King Tut – the last of his great dynasty.
The bone disease he suffered runs in families and is more likely to be passed down if two first-degree relatives marry and have children, the study published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association shows.
They described him as: ‘A young but frail king who needed canes to walk.’
This explains the presence of more than 100 canes in his tomb, which he would have needed in the afterlife. A sudden leg fracture possibly introduced by a fall might have resulted in a life-threatening condition when a malaria infection occurred,’ the JAMA article said.
Tut, who became pharaoh at the age of ten in 1333 BC, ruled for just nine years until his death. He was the last of the royal line from the eighteenth dynasty of the New Kingdom. The cause of King Tut’s death has long been disputed among historians, with many speculating that he was murdered.
Theories that he was assassinated stemmed from the fact that he was the last ruler of his dynasty and had a hole in the back of his head. However, in 2005 Dr Hawass announced his team had found no evidence for a blow to the back of the head, and the hole was from the mummification process. King Tut was succeeded by the high priest Ay for four years – who also married his widow Ankhesenpamon.
King Tut’s grandmother Queen Tiye, the mother of Pharaoh Akhenaten. The hairpiece behind her is believed to have been made up of her own hair. It has not disintegrated because of the mummification process and the dry conditions within the tomb
The two faces of the boy king Tutankhamun. Left, his mummified head and, right, reconstruction of what he would have looked like
Ay was followed by the military leader Horemheb who ruled for 26 years until he ceded power to Ramses, founder of the 19th dynasty. The researchers studied 16 mummies from the Valley of the Kings. They revealed that beneath the golden splendour in which they lived, ancient Egypt’s royals were as vulnerable as the lowliest peasant to disease.
Three other mummies besides tuts showed repeated malaria infections and incestuous marriages only worsened their maladies. However, analysis of King Tut’s family disproved speculation his family suffered from rare disorders that gave them feminine attributes and misshapen bones, including Marfan syndrome, a connective tissue disorder that can result in elongated limbs.
The theories arose from the artistic style and statues of the period, which showed the royal men with prominent breasts, elongated heads and flared hips.
‘It is unlikely that either Tutankhamun or Akhenaten actually displayed a significantly bizarre or feminine physique,’ the team said. One of the most impressive-looking mummies who was studied was King Tut’s grandmother, Queen Tiye.
She was the chief wife of Amenhotep III and mother of King Tut’s father Akhenaten. She was the first queen to figure so prominently beside her husband in statues and temple reliefs. Queen Tiye held much political influence at court and acted as an adviser to her son after the death of her husband. There has been speculation that her eldest son Prince Tuthmose was in fact Moses who led the Israelites into the Promised Land.
After 3,000 years and DNA analysis, scientists have proved that from foreground to background, these mummies are of King Tut’s mother, grandmother, and his father, Akhenaten
Antiquities expert Dr Zahi Hawass (right) announces today in Cairo’s Egypt Museum that the mummies in front of him have been identified as Tutankhamun’s father, mother and grandmother by using DNA
Technicians take DNA samples from the mummy of Boy Pharaoh Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings. Tests revealed his parents were siblings
A lock of her hair was found in a miniature coffin in King Tut’s tomb. Her tomb was identified by matching the labelled hair in Tut’s tomb with the well-preserved hair on her mummy. The ancient Egyptians were very concerned with maintaining their hair to promote their social status. They devised remedies for baldness and greying and regularly washed and scented their hair. Adults sometimes wore hairpieces and had elaborate styles.
The hairpiece found by Queen Tiye is believed to have been made up of her own hair. It has not disintegrated because of the mummification process and the dry conditions within the tomb. Hair does not continue to grow after death, instead, the skin retracts around the follicles as it dries, making the hair jut out more prominently.
King Tutankhamun has long been big business.
A 1970s Tut exhibit drew millions of visitors to U.S. museums, and a popular revival including artefacts from his tomb and others’ has been travelling around the United States for the past several years and is currently at San Francisco’s DeYoung Museum. Egypt’s economy depends a great deal on tourism, which brings in around $10billion a year in revenue. The King Tut exhibit at Cairo’s Egyptian Museum is one of the crown jewels of the country’s ancient past and features a stunning array of treasures including Tut’s most iconic relic – the golden funeral mask.
Another tourist destination is Tut’s tomb tucked in the Valley of the Kings amid Luxor’s desert hills. In 1922, British archaeologist Howard Carter discovered it and the trove of fabulous gold and precious stones inside, propelling the once-forgotten pharaoh into global stardom. Hundreds of tourists come daily to the tomb to see Tut’s mummy, which has been on display there since 2007.
Though historically Tut was a minor king, the grander image ‘is embedded in our psyche’ and the new revelations won’t change that, said James Phillips, a curator at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History.
‘Reality is reality, but it’s not going to change his place in the folk heroism of popular culture,’ Phillips said. ‘The way he was found, what was found in his grave – even though he was a minor king, it has excited the imagination of people since 1922.’
Dr Zahi Hawass removed King Tut from his stone sarcophagus in 2007 to study his DNA. Tests revealed the king was a sickly young adult.
A group of UK-based researchers discovered the remains of a stillborn human fetus with an unusual condition in a 2,100-year-old Egyptian mummy long thought to be that of a hawk.
The mummy of an ancient bird was found at the Maidstone Museum in the United Kingdom. Its funerary casement featured a gilt-painted hawk’s face and was just the right size for a bird.
Horus, the Egyptian falcon-headed god, was also mentioned in the hieroglyphics on it.
All these decorations combined with the common practice of animal mummification in ancient Egypt led to the misidentification of the mummy.
Archaeologists long suspected that a tiny 2,100-year-old Egyptian mummy contained the remains of a hawk.A new analysis of the tiny mummy shows it was not a bird beneath the wrappings, but a stillborn human fetus
As a result, it was stored with other animal mummies without conducting CT scans or special attention.
However, the error came to light when the museum decided to scan their resident female mummy as well as a bunch of other animal mummies kept in storage including “EA 493 — Mummified Hawk Ptolemaic Period.”
The images of the scan revealed arms crossed over the chest and suggested that there was something else inside — a human or maybe a monkey — but not a bird for sure.
They called bioarchaeologist Andrew Nelson from Western University, London, to take a closer look.
Nelson and his interdisciplinary team conducted high-resolution micro-CT scans to virtually unwrap the mummy and found that it contains a severely malformed male human fetus, stillborn between 23 and 28 weeks of gestation.
The fetus, as the researchers revealed, suffered from major spinal abnormalities and a rare birth condition called anencephaly, wherein the brain and the skull fail to develop properly.
While the images revealed the mummified fetus had well-formed toes and fingers, the skull bore severe signs of deformities. “The whole top part of his skull isn’t formed,” Nelson said in a statement, noting that the brain of the fetus would not have formed in that scenario.
“The arches of the vertebrae of his spine haven’t closed. His earbones are at the back of his head.”
The work, as the researchers said, makes it the second mummified fetus to have been identified with anencephaly as well as the most studied fetal mummy in history.
“The family’s response was to mummify this individual, which was very rare. In ancient Egypt, fetuses tended to be buried in pots, below house floors, in various ways,” Nelson added.
According to Western University bioarchaeologist Andrew Nelson, there are only about six to eight known fetal mummies from ancient Egypt, making this family’s response very rare. The rarity of this mummification suggests it may have ties to ancient Egyptian magic
“There are only about six or eight known to have been mummified. So this was a very special individual.”
The findings also provide important clues into the diet of the baby’s mother and hint at a lack of foods containing folic acid, which plays a critical role in the development of the neural tube and can lead to anencephaly, if not provided sufficiently.
“It would have been a tragic moment for the family to lose their infant and to give birth to a very strange-looking fetus, not a normal-looking fetus at all,” the researcher concluded.
Fossils that “clearly foreshadow” modern humans are 30,000 years older than we thought
The Omo I and Herto fossils, found in East Africa, are the oldest known Homo sapiens fossils yet discovered in the region — but a new study shows they are tens of thousands of years older than we thought. Older studies had dated the Omo I and Herto fossils to 197,000 years old and between 155,000 to 160,000 years old, respectively. They are, in fact, far older.
“The Omo I and Herto specimens are the oldest Homo Sapiens that have been found so far [in the region], so their discovery and their age are critical to understanding the emergence of our species,” Céline Vidal, lead author on the study and a volcanologist at Fitzwilliam College, tells Inverse.
Vidal and her team use ancient volcanic eruptions to date the human fossils. In a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, they re-examine the Omo I and Herto fossils in Ethiopia. The findings push back the starting point for human history in eastern Africa by some 36,000 years.
Researchers analyzed pumice rock from an ancient volcanic eruption in the area to determine an updated age for the Omo I fossils.
HOW THEY DID IT — In the past, scientists had used the age of the volcanic ash layer beneath the old bones to infer when the fossils were deposited.
But, “there was some uncertainty on the position of this layer relative to the fossil,” Vidal says.
Unfortunately, the sediment layer above the fossils contains a kind of thick volcanic ash known as KHS; the grains of this kind of ash is too small to accurately date using the current technology — so this layer was no help in trying to narrow down the fossils’ true age. Instead, archaeologists have tried to determine the Omo I and Herto fossils’ ages using the signatures of other past volcanic eruptions in the area.
“While studying big eruptions from the Ethiopian Rift, we identified a colossal eruption of Shala volcano, which occurred some 233,000 years ago,” Vidal says. “The age was obtained from pumice rocks found near the volcano.”
In this study, Vidal’s team used a dating method known as “single crystal argon-argon” dating — in this method, the scientists measure the amount of the element argon in volcanic minerals like ash and pumice rock. This signature allows scientists to pinpoint when the magma originally erupted from the Earth’s surface.
Brian Stewart, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan who was not involved in the study, tells Inverse that, generally, “single-crystal argon-argon dating is very well established and reliable,” and is “beautifully suited” to studying fossils in eastern Africa due to the history of volcanic eruptions in the area.
“It is a remarkable method because it can go as far back in time as the age of the Earth,” Vidal says. Or, in the case of Vidal’s work: As far back as the time of the oldest modern human beings.
WHAT THEY FOUND — The researchers obtained a more precise minimum age of the Omo I fossils, specifically that they are likely 233,000 years old. It’s worth keeping in mind that the margin of error is pretty significant: Plus or minus 22,000 years — so they may be even older or younger.
“The error margin associated with this new date is obviously very large, and at its upper — younger — margin does not massively change the previous age estimate of the Omo I finds, perhaps moving it back in time by 10-15,000 years,” Stewart says.
If their true age is closer to the median estimated date of 233,000 years — or even older — then the finding is “definitely significant” Stewart adds.
Either way, the Omo I fossil specimens — the oldest known Homo sapiens in eastern Africa — have officially become much, much older. Since some archaeologists believe early modern humans may have originated in this region, that makes the findings all the more significant.
“Our findings push the age of the oldest Homo sapiens to later than 200,000 years,” Vidal says.
Did humans originate in eastern Africa? The updated findings on the date of the Omo I fossils could shift how we think about the evolution of humans on the continent.
WHY IT MATTERS — For too long, the official archaeological date — the age of the oldest known fossils of Homo sapiens from eastern Africa — hasn’t matched up with evolutionary models of human history. Evolutionary models suggest our species arose some 300,000 years ago. The oldest ever Homo sapiens fossils were discovered in Morocco — it is some 300,000 years old.
“The Omo I fossils exhibit traits that much more clearly foreshadow later Homo sapiens than those displayed by what has been proposed as the very earliest specimens in the sapiens lineage: the 300,000-year-old fossil skulls from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco,” Stewart says. The discovery puts the archaeological date of the Omo I fossils in closer proximity to this evolutionary timeline for Homo sapiens.
“This new age constraint is congruent with most models for the evolution of modern humans, which estimate the origin of H. sapiens and its divergence from archaic humans at about 350–200 thousand years ago,” Vidal says.
The findings could help settle another longstanding archaeological debate: Did our species originate in a single area in eastern Africa, or from multiple areas of the continent?
“Current opinions of our species’ origins have shifted away from a single-region African model and towards a multiregional African model,” Stewart says. The updated timeline of the Omo I fossils could shift the thinking about where and how humans evolved in Africa once more, Stewart explains:
“If the more modern-looking Omo specimens turn out to fall squarely within that time envelope, we may need think twice before we toss out a single origin model altogether, especially one that sees our species evolving across a single interconnected region that was much larger than previously imagined.”
WHAT’S NEXT — For now, Vidal and her team are clear: This is far from a definitive conclusion on the origins of humanity. While the study provides an updated “minimum age” for these fossil specimens in eastern Africa, the “maximum age” — i.e., the oldest age of the Omo I humans — is still a mystery.
Also, further research is needed to provide a more accurate age for the Herto fossils — the other significant site of ancient Homo sapiens found in the region.
“We can only date humanity based on the fossils that we have, so it’s impossible to say that this is the definitive age of our species,” Vidal says.
Future fossil findings could very well push the timeline of modern Homo sapiens “even further back in time.”
“The study of human evolution is always in motion; boundaries and timelines change as our understanding improves,” Vidal says.
Abstract: Efforts to date the oldest modern human fossils in eastern Africa, from Omo-Kibish1–3 and Herto4,5 in Ethiopia, have drawn on a variety of chronometric evidence, including 40Ar/39Ar ages of stratigraphically associated tuffs. The ages that are generally reported for these fossils are around 197 thousand years (kyr) for the Kibish Omo I3,6,7, and around 160–155 kyr for the Herto hominins5,8. However, the stratigraphic relationships and tephra correlations that underpin these estimates have been challenged6,8. Here we report geochemical analyses that link the Kamoya’s Hominid Site (KHS) Tuff9, which conclusively overlies the member of the Kibish Formation that contains Omo I, with a major explosive eruption of Shala volcano in the Main Ethiopian Rift. By dating the proximal deposits of this eruption, we obtain a new minimum age for the Omo fossils of 233 ± 22 kyr. Contrary to previous arguments6,8, we also show that the KHS Tuff does not correlate with another widespread tephra layer, the Waidedo Vitric Tuff, and therefore cannot anchor a minimum age for the Herto fossils. Shifting the age of the oldest known Homo sapiens fossils in eastern Africa to before around 200 thousand years ago is consistent with independent evidence for greater antiquity of the modern human lineage.
