For years scientists believed in a Garden of Eden. Theirs was not the life-giving paradise described in the book of Genesis, nor the medley of natural splendour depicted by Rubens and Brueghel the Elder, but an area of east Africa in which the first members of the species Homo sapiens, the real Adam and Eve, lived some 200,000 years ago.
Today that account is in doubt. Researchers have uncovered fossilised bones of early humans at Jebel Irhoud in Morocco. These creatures were not identical to modern-day people, but they were not far off . Their faces looked similar to ours, they could walk among us and pass for the humans of today. Their remains have been found with tools dated to 300,000 years ago, 100,000 years before the era previously thought to mark the emergence of the species Homo sapiens.
The location of the fossils is significant. They have been found not in Ethiopia, which scientists declared the cradle of humanity in 2005, but 3,500 miles away across the Sahara. It now appears possible our species did not spring from the rift valley of east Africa 200,000 years ago and then move to other continents, as once thought, but was already dispersed across Africa many millennia before then. Most study of early humans is now done on computers, comparing the genomes of thousands of people to work out who interbred with whom, and when. This discovery is an endorsement of old-fashioned digging.
It also shows the value of a hunch. Jean-Jacques Hublin, an anthropologist at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, was intrigued for years by unusual human-like remains found in Morocco half a century ago, explained away at the time as belonging to an idiosyncratic African Neanderthal. He is to be commended for spearheading a new excavation to clear things up. We are older than we thought.