Scientists Reconstructed the Face of the Oldest Known Homo sapiens from 315,000 Years Ago

Scientists rebuilt the face of a human from the very beginning of our species.

At first glance, it’s striking; but look at the face long enough and the strangeness begins to fade.

Sure, the brow is heavy and the skull is broad. But the eyes, nose and mouth belong to someone who would not seem entirely out of place in a crowd today.

That’s what makes a new reconstruction of one of humanity’s earliest known faces both so unsettling and so familiar. The man depicted by researchers lived in what is now Morocco around 315,000 years ago, as to close to the dawn of Homo sapiens as it gets.

The facial reconstruction was based on the skulls from the Jebel Irhoud hominins of Morocco, the oldest known fossils widely attributed to Homo sapiens. The portrait was not built from a single individual. Instead, it is a scientifically constrained approximation built from a composite skull assembled from several individuals, then given soft tissues using methods borrowed from forensic reconstruction.

Miners at Jebel Irhoud uncovered the first skull, Irhoud 1, in 1961, and researchers initially described it as a roughly 40,000-year-old African Neanderthal. But then a landmark 2017 Nature study instead placed the remains at about 315,000 years old and identified them as early Homo sapiens.

The discovery instantly made headlines. Anthropologists were thrilled as the findings pushed the known fossil record of our species back by roughly 100,000 years. It also strengthened the case that modern humans emerged through evolutionary changes occurring across Africa rather than at a single eastern African birthplace. But reconstructing the face is another challenge.

Building a face from several ancient people

The reconstruction had to be performed like a forensic jigsaw puzzle, as no single skull from this site and period was found completely intact. Most of the braincase and upper face come from Irhoud 1. The lower jaw comes from Irhoud 11, while Irhoud 10, 21 and 22 helped complete portions of the upper jaw and teeth. All came from the same archaeological layer at Jebel Irhoud.

Using images and video released by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in 2017, the team rebuilt the composite skull with photogrammetry. The international team of researchers then took a CT scan from an anonymized modern adult and digitally deformed its anatomy until the cranium matched the fossil geometry. Modern soft-tissue measurements from people of African ancestry helped guide the face, while another anatomical template informed the shape of the nose.

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“Because no direct soft-tissue data exist for Middle Pleistocene hominins, the use of reference datasets derived from modern human populations represents a necessary methodological proxy rather than an assumption of biological equivalence,” the researchers write in the study.

They produced two versions of the face. One is grayscale and hairless, designed to reveal the underlying anatomy with minimal distraction. The other adds pigmentation, hair and a beard. The latter portrait involves quite a few artistic choices and assumptions, as these traits aren’t preserved in the fossils.

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A modern-looking face on an older-shaped skull

The digital model also yielded an endocranial volume — essentially the capacity inside the braincase — of 1,364 milliliters. That closely matches a previous CT-based estimate of 1,375 milliliters. After applying a correction from cranial capacity to estimated brain tissue, the researchers calculated a brain volume of about 1,230 cubic centimeters, close to the modern adult male average used for comparison.

However, the most interesting feature is not how big the brain was, but how unfinished the skull still looked.

Jebel Irhoud already had a recognizably modern face, jaw and teeth. But behind that face, the braincase remained long and archaic. Later research showed that the rounded skull shape typical of humans today evolved only after Homo sapiens had already appeared.

The new face makes the mismatch easier to imagine. An unmistakably human visage sits on a skull whose architecture still preserves an earlier chapter of our evolution.

It’s worth reminding that modern anatomy may not perfectly represent people living 315,000 years ago, and neither hair nor pigmentation can be recovered from these remains. The authors therefore call their result a “morphologically plausible approximation,” rather than a definitive likeness.

The reconstruction was documented in a new study published in the journal Heritage.