Story filed: 12:41 Wednesday 11th June 2003Scientists have unearthed three 160,000-year-old human skulls in Ethiopia.
They are believed to be the oldest known and best-preserved fossils of modern humans' immediate predecessors.
The nearly complete skulls of an adult male, a child and the partial skull of a second adult appear to represent a crucial stage of human evolution when contemporary facial features developed.
Discovered in the Afar region, the skulls have a prominent forehead, flattened face and reduced brow, that contrast with older humans' projecting, heavy-browed skulls.
"They're not quite completely modern, but they're well on their way. They're close enough to call homo sapiens," said Tim White, co-leader of the international team that excavated the skulls.
Previously, the earliest fossils of homo sapiens found in Africa had been dated to about 130,000 to 100,000 years, although they were less complete and sometimes poorly dated.
The new skulls,dated at between 160,000 and 154,000 years old, are described in two papers that appear in Nature magazine.
G. Philip Rightmire, a paleoanthropologist at State University of New York at Binghamton, called the skulls a "spectacular" find.
He said they provide the clearest fossil evidence to date for an African origin of modern humans, and strike another blow against the idea that modern humans had a "multiregional" origin within and outside Africa.
© Associated Press
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