OMO 1 skull, discovered in 1967, has benefited from a new dating that ages over 30,000 years old. And temporarily brings it closer to even older Moroccan fossils.
Le Monde Science and Medicine
The man of Kibish, or Omo 1, is a fossil discovered in 1967 in the Valley of the Omo, in the south of Ethiopia, by a team led by the Paleontologist Kenyan Richard Leakey, died on January 2nd . OMO 1, which presents the bulk of the anatomical characteristics of our species, Homo Sapiens, had initially been dated 130,000 years. In 1995, the surrounding sediment analysis had given a date close to 200,000 years. A study published in the journal Nature, on January 13, ages it again: these are this time volcanic minerals present in the layers covering fossils that suggest a minimum age of 233,000, with a range of more or less 22,000 years old. Céline Vidal (University of Cambridge) and his colleagues have established that these rocks originated by Shala, a volcano near 400 kilometers north-east of OMO. This aging of the fossil closer to those of Jebel Irhoud, in Morocco, dated 315,000 years, sometimes presented as the oldest representatives of our species, but presenting some more archaic characteristics than those of OMO 1.
