Paleoanthropologists working in a cave system on the outskirts of Casablanca, Morocco have uncovered skull fragments, jaw bones, and teeth that they believe may belong to the last common ancestor shared by modern Homo sapiens and Neanderthals. The specimens, dated to approximately 700,000 years ago using uranium-series dating, display a mosaic of primitive and derived features bridging the anatomical gap between the two lineages.
If confirmed by further analysis, the discovery would fill one of the most significant remaining gaps in the human fossil record — the ancestral population that gave rise to our species in Africa and to the Neanderthals who colonized Europe and western Asia.
The Right Place, the Right Time
Genetic studies of ancient DNA from both modern humans and Neanderthals had previously converged on a population split between roughly 550,000 and 750,000 years ago, most likely somewhere in Africa or the eastern Mediterranean. The Casablanca specimens date to exactly this window and come from a geographically plausible location for a population that could have dispersed in multiple directions.
"What makes these fossils extraordinary is that they are genuinely intermediate," said Dr. Abderrahim Mohib of the Institut National des Sciences de l'Archéologie et du Patrimoine in Morocco, who led the excavation. "They are neither fully modern in their anatomy nor fully Neanderthal. They are exactly the kind of thing we have been looking for."