What Is the Oldest Human Skull Ever Found?

Scientists keep three questions apart, and so will we.

The first question is about our species. The second is about the genus Homo, which includes Homo sapiens and earlier species such as Homo habilis. The Smithsonian's Human Origins Program describes the Ledi jaw as the earliest fossil attributed to Homo. The earliest named Homo species is often given as Homo habilis, known from fossils dated roughly 2.4 to 1.4 million years ago, though the boundaries and ancestry of early Homo are still debated. The third question takes in relatives who were not Homo at all.

At Jebel Irhoud, in Morocco, excavators recovered skulls, teeth and long bones from at least five individuals, along with Middle Stone Age tools and animal remains. The team led by Hublin published the dating in Nature in 2017. Thermoluminescence dating, a method that measures when flint was last heated, was applied to burned flint from the same deposits and gave an age of about 300,000 years. That makes these fossils about 100,000 years older than the oldest securely dated Homo sapiens fossils accepted before them.

The skulls tell a particular story. The faces and teeth look modern, but the braincases are elongated and more archaic in shape. So, human features did not all arrive at once; they developed in stages. The Max Planck Society reads the site as evidence that Homo sapiens populations were spread across much of Africa by about 300,000 years ago, rather than coming from one isolated corner of East Africa. The Smithsonian Human Origins Program gives the same summary.

Jebel Irhoud is not alone. Several other sites hold very early members of our species, and a few are still argued over.

• Omo I, Ethiopia. The skull from the Kibish Formation was once thought to be about 130,000 years old. After the sediments were re-dated, it is placed at about 195,000 years (a Nature paper by McDougall, Brown and Fleagle; the Smithsonian record for Omo I).
• Herto, Ethiopia. Adult and child skulls are dated to about 160,000 to 154,000 years, by argon-argon dating and by matching volcanic layers (White and colleagues, Nature).
• Florisbad, South Africa. The Smithsonian gives about 259,000 years. The skull is fragmentary and mixed in its features, so it is sometimes called Homo heidelbergensis and sometimes early Homo sapiens (Smithsonian record).
• Misliya 1, Israel. This is a partial upper jaw, not a skull, dated to 177,000 to 194,000 years by several methods, and it is among the earliest Homo sapiens remains outside Africa (Tel Aviv University).
• Apidima, Greece. Apidima 1 was dated by uranium-series methods to more than 210,000 years, and Harvati and colleagues read it as early Homo sapiens (Nature, 2019). That reading is debated, because the cranium is incomplete and distorted and has no archaeological context. Apidima 2, from the same cave, is more than 170,000 years old and has Neanderthal-like features.

If you were wondering about the oldest human skull outside Africa, these two, Misliya and Apidima, are the ones to know, and Apidima 1 remains an open question.

Go back further and you meet relatives who were not Homo sapiens, or even Homo.

Toumaï. The cranium TM 266-01-060-1 comes from Toros-Menalla in Chad and is classified as *Sahelanthropus tchadensis*. The Smithsonian dates it to between 7 and 6 million years ago. Its name means "hope of life" in the local Dazaga language. It is an early hominin, a member of the human family tree, and its exact place on that tree is debated.

The Taung Child. This skull of *Australopithecus africanus* was found in South Africa and is about 2.8 million years old. From the development of its teeth, the child was about 3.3 years old when it died (Smithsonian).

Lucy. Specimen AL 288-1 was found at Hadar, Ethiopia, in 1974. She is an adult female *Australopithecus afarensis* and about 3.2 million years old (Smithsonian). People often ask how old Lucy was when she died. The evidence shows she was an adult, but it does not give a precise age in years.

Dmanisi. In Georgia, the site of Dmanisi produced *Homo erectus* skulls dated to roughly 1.85 to 1.75 million years ago, including specimen D2282 at about 1.77 million. Dmanisi is among the earliest evidence of Homo outside Africa (Smithsonian, D2282).

Two skeletons often come up here. Naia was found in Hoyo Negro, a submerged cenote in the Sac Actun cave system near Tulum, Quintana Roo, Mexico. She was a teenage female Homo sapiens who lived about 12,000 to 13,000 years ago. Mexico's INAH, the National Institute of Anthropology and History, describes her as one of the oldest and most complete human skeletons recovered in the Americas, in its page on Hoyo Negro. You can read her story in full in our guide to Naia and Hoyo Negro.

Luzia comes from Lapa Vermelha IV in Minas Gerais, Brazil. The skull and skeleton are dated to about 11,500 years ago (Smithsonian, Luzia).

Is either one "the oldest in the Americas"? That depends on what is being compared: a skull, a complete skeleton or any single fragment, and on the dating method. When you read a ranking, look for the type of specimen and how it was dated.

Two other questions come up often. The first is the biggest human skull ever found. There is no accepted record, because "big" could mean physical size or cranial capacity. One famous example is KNM-ER 1470, generally classified as *Homo rudolfensis*, with a cranial capacity of about 775 cubic centimetres, larger than typical *Homo habilis* skulls (Smithsonian). That makes it a notable early skull rather than a world record.

The second is who was the first species to bury its dead. No species can be named with full certainty. Neanderthal burials such as those at Shanidar Cave in Iraq are among the strongest early evidence of intentional burial, and scientists still discuss how to read them, as the Shanidar Cave Project explains. For the people behind that evidence, see our guide to the Neanderthal skull.

Several museums let you stand in front of exact replicas of these skulls. The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., shows more than 75 replicas of early human skulls in the David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins, including a Jebel Irhoud cast and reconstructions of Lucy. The Natural History Museum in London has a Human Evolution gallery with a Lucy cast, early Homo sapiens casts from Africa and Israel, Neanderthal material and Homo naledi casts. The American Museum of Natural History in New York has a Lucy cast in its Hall of Human Origins. The original Lucy fossil is held by the National Museum of Ethiopia in Addis Ababa. For Naia, INAH facilities and interpretive displays in Quintana Roo are the place to start.

Displays and opening arrangements change, so confirm current access, fees and display status with each museum before you travel.