Fossils found in the cave shed light on where our species originated, tracing where the Earth’s magnetic field turned.

Where did our species first appear? Fossils found in ancient Morocco more than 773,000 years old support the idea that Homo sapiens originated in Africa, scientists said in a study on Wednesday.

The oldest Homo sapien fossilsdating back more than 300,000 years, were found in Jebel Irhoud northwest of Marrakesh.

Our cousins The Neanderthals most lived in Europe, while the latest additions to the family, the Denisovans, roamed Asia.

This has created an enduring mystery: who was the last ancestor of Homo sapiens and our cousins, before the family tree split into different branches?

This split is thought to have occurred between 550,000 and 750,000 years ago.

To date, the largest hominin remains from that time have been found in Atapuerca, Spain.

They belonged to a species called “Homo antecessor,” which was formed about 800,000 years ago, and had characteristics that were a mixture of the older Homo erectus and those more similar to Homo sapiens and our cousins.

This sparked a debate about whether our species originated outside of Africa, before returning there.

There was a “gap in the African fossil record,” French paleoanthropologist and lead author Jean-Jacques Hublin told AFP.

A study published in the journal Nature fills that gap by finally getting a firm date for fossils discovered in 1969 inside a cave in the Moroccan city of Casablanca.

For more than three decades, a French-Moroccan team unearthed hominin vertebrae, teeth and jaw fragments that have baffled researchers.

Researchers say that the thigh bone found in the cave has bite marks that indicate that a person may have been killed or raped by an animal, Reuters news agency reported.

“Only the femur shows clear evidence of carnivore modification – gnawing and tooth marks – indicating consumption by a large carnivore,” Hublin told Reuters. “However, it seems that this cave was a hunting ground used only occasionally by hominins. The absence of tooth marks on the thighs does not mean that other parts of the bodies were not eaten by wolves or other carnivores.”

The thin lower jaw found in 2008 proved to be very strange.

“Hominins that lived half a million or a million years usually didn’t have small jaws,” Hublin said.

“We could tell it was very unusual — and we wondered how old it might be.”

However, many attempts to find out its age have been unsuccessful.

When the earth’s magnetic field turns

Then the researchers tried a different method.

All the time, the earth’s magnetic field is rotating. Until the last revolution — 773,000 years ago — our earth’s north pole was close to the geographic south pole.

Evidence of this change is still preserved in rocks around the world.

The remains of Casablanca were found in layers that coincide with the time of this conversion, allowing scientists to get a “very precise” date, Hublin said.

These findings rule out the “absence of a plausible ancestor” for Homo sapiens in Africa, he added.

Antonio Rosas, a researcher at Spain’s National Museum of Natural Sciences, said it adds “weight to the increasingly widespread view” that the origin of both our species and the last ancestor of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals/Denisovans is in Africa.

“This work also suggests that the evolutionary divergence of the H. sapiens lineage may have started earlier than commonly thought,” notes Rosas, who was not involved in the research, in Nature.

Like the Homo antecessor, the Casablanca fossils have a mix of features from Homo erectus, us and our cousins.

But while they are clearly related, the Moroccan and Spanish remains are not the same, which Hublin says is a sign of “a people on the way to separate and separate.”

The Middle East is considered the main migration route for hominins out of Africa, however occasional sea subsidence may have allowed crossings between Tunisia and Sicily — or across the Strait of Gibraltar.

So the remains of Casablanca are “another piece of evidence that supports the idea of ​​possible trade” between North Africa and southwestern Europe, Hublin said.

This study was published in a few weeks, scientists said that the newly discovered fossils show that a a mysterious foot found in Ethiopia she belongs to a little-known person, recently named as an ancient relative who lived next to the famous Lucy’s species.