Age of the oldest known Homo sapiens from eastern Africa
Abstract
Efforts to date the oldest modern human fossils in eastern Africa, from Omo-Kibish1,2,3 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 Omo-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 lineage10.
Citation
Vidal , C M , Lane , C S , Asrat , A , Barfod , D N , Mark , D F , Tomlinson , E L , Tadesse , A Z , Yirgu , G , Deino , A , Hutchison , W , Mounier , A & Oppenheimer , C 2022 , ' Age of the oldest known Homo sapiens from eastern Africa ' , Nature , vol. 601 , pp. 579-585 . https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04275-8
Publication
Nature
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1476-4687Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © The Author(s) 2022. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Description
This study was supported by the Leverhulme Trust (‘Nature and impacts of Middle Pleistocene volcanism in the Ethiopian Rift’, 2016–21) and the Cambridge-Africa ALBORADA Research Fund (‘Volcanic tie-lines between records of past climates and early modern humans in Ethiopia, 2019–21’). Ar-Ar dating was supported by grant NIGFSC IP-1683-1116 through the UK Natural Environment Research Council. The iCRAG LA-ICP-MS facility at Trinity College Dublin is supported by SFI award 13/RC/2092.Collections
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