TODAY’S MODERATOR: We all just got older

We just learned a cool new thing about ourselves.

News reports came out this week about a fossil find that pushes the birth of humankind in our current form way back. "Fossils discovered in Morocco are the oldest known remains of Homo sapiens, scientists reported on Wednesday, a finding that rewrites the story of mankind's origins and suggests that our species evolved in multiple locations across the African continent," wrote The New York Times.

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“’We did not evolve from a single “cradle of mankind” somewhere in East Africa,” said Philipp Gunz, a paleoanthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and a co-author of two new studies on the fossils, published in the journal Nature. ‘We evolved on the African continent.

“Until now,” the newspaper reports, “the oldest known fossils of our species dated back just 195,000 years. The Moroccan fossils, by contrast, are roughly 300,000 years old. Remarkably, they indicate that early Homo sapiens had faces much like our own, although their brains differed in fundamental ways.”

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