{"id":2231,"date":"2017-06-08T08:00:55","date_gmt":"2017-06-08T08:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/?p=2231"},"modified":"2017-06-07T14:30:00","modified_gmt":"2017-06-07T14:30:00","slug":"dr-matthew-skinner-helps-push-back-evolutionary-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/2017\/06\/08\/dr-matthew-skinner-helps-push-back-evolutionary-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Dr Matthew Skinner helps push back evolutionary history"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Dr <a href=\"https:\/\/www.kent.ac.uk\/sac\/staff-profiles\/profiles\/biological-anthropology\/academic-staff\/skinner_matthew.html\" target=\"_blank\">Matthew Skinner<\/a> has been involved in a major project analysing and dating new fossils from Morocco that alter our understanding of the origin of our species, <em>Homo sapiens<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Led by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany (where Dr Skinner was a research fellow prior to coming to Kent) and the National Institute for Archaeology and Heritage in Morocco, a diverse team of scientists sought to\u00a0identify and date the new fossils, stone tools and animal bones\u00a0found at the site of Jebel Irhoud in Morocco.<\/p>\n<p>The dating analyses conducted on the fossils and surrounding sediments found that they are over 300,000 years old,\u00a0pushing back the fossil evidence for the origin of humans in Africa by more than 100,000 years. Previous fossil finds of a similar nature in Ethiopia had previously been dated to around 160,000-200,000 years old.<\/p>\n<p>Dr Skinner\u2019s involvement on the project involved\u00a0analysing the teeth preserved in the fossils\u00a0and confirming, along with analyses of other parts of the skeleton, that they belonged to individuals of our own species,\u00a0<em>Homo sapiens<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Collectively, these findings about the bones, stone tools and sediments of this site<strong>\u00a0<\/strong>change the understanding of the evolutionary origins of\u00a0<em>Homo sapiens<\/em>\u00a0in Africa\u00a0by suggesting they originated\u00a0much earlier, and over a much larger area\u00a0of the African continent, than previously thought.<\/p>\n<p>The findings are being published in two papers in\u00a0<em>Nature<\/em>, titled\u00a0<em>New fossils from Jebel Irhoud (Morocco) and the Pan-African origin of Homo sapiens<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0<em>The Age of the Homo sapiens fossils from Jebel Irhoud (Morocco) and the origins of the Middle Stone Age<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dr Matthew Skinner has been involved in a major project analysing and dating new fossils from Morocco that alter our understanding of the origin of &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/2017\/06\/08\/dr-matthew-skinner-helps-push-back-evolutionary-history\/\">Read&nbsp;more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40284,"featured_media":2232,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[124,70,6600],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2231"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40284"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2231"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2231\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2235,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2231\/revisions\/2235"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}