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<\/a>Located some 50 kilometers from the Atlantic coast, the site of Jebel Irhoud in Morocco was inhabited during a wetter period than today. Ancient humans at the site hunted gazelles, zebras, and wildebeests. Illustration by Mark Garrison<\/p><\/div>\n
Hublin says the fossil human bones found at Jebel Irhoud belonged to at least five individuals\u2014three young adults, one adolescent, and a child about eight years old. \u201cThe faces of these people would have been short, flat, and retracted,\u201d says Hublin. \u201cIt\u2019s the face of people that you cross in the street today.\u201d Even so, the humans at Jebel Irhoud would have had a somewhat heavier build than humans today.<\/p>\n
And their brains would have been organized differently than ours, Hublin adds. At Jebel Irhoud, for example, the 300,000-year-old braincases\u2014the part of the skull that houses the brain\u2014are elongated in shape and accommodate a larger cerebellum, the part of the brain that plays an important role in maintaining balance, coordinating voluntary movements, and fine-tuning motor skills. Modern humans have a similar overall cranial capacity, but we possess a smaller cerebellum, suggesting that our gray matter is wired in a different way.<\/p>\n
Team member Shannon McPherron, an archaeologist at Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, thinks the climatic conditions at Jebel Irhoud would have been somewhat wetter than they are today, based on clues gleaned from the site\u2019s faunal record. The landscape would have been green and open, with clumps of trees\u2014a habitat favorable to animals such as gazelles and zebras. The humans who overnighted at Jebel Irhoud, McPherron adds, were hunters armed with what was then the latest stone tool technology\u2014sharp-edged stone flakes likely used as spear tips as opposed to the heavy stone axes or cleavers carried by Early Stone Age humans.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe overall picture,\u201d says McPherron, \u201cis that this is a kind of hunting encampment, where people spent the night and took shelter.\u201d<\/p>\n