Scientists determine age of some of the oldest human bones
Some of the oldest human remains ever unearthed are the Omo One bones found in Ethiopia. For decades, their precise age has been debated, but a new study argues they're around 233,000 years old.
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
In the late 1960s archaeologists discovered a set of familiar bones in Ethiopia - a skull bone, a lower jaw, parts of a torso. These were remains of hom*o sapiens, early humans. That collection is known as Omo 1.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
The contents of Omo 1 were initially thought to be around 200,000 years old, already some of the oldest human bones ever unearthed. But scientists have debated their precise age.
TIM WHITE: To understand how humans evolved in Africa, you need a time frame. And to construct that time frame, one needs to have accurate dating techniques. Unfortunately, we are just beyond the range of radiocarbon or C-14 dating. So you have to employ other techniques to determine the true age of these fossils.
CHANG: That's Tim White, professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley. One of those techniques involves determining the age of the environment where the bones were found - in the case of Oma 1, a layer of volcanic ash.
CELINE VIDAL: There was a bit of controversy because the way Oma 1 was first dated was using an ash layer that was supposedly found just below. But it wasn't found where the fossils were actually found. It was found a bit further away.
SHAPIRO: Celine Vidal is a volcanologist at the University of Cambridge, and she says that the ash layer above Oma 1 was fine like flour. That's hard for scientists to date.
CHANG: But in a new analysis, Vidal and her colleagues found that the volcanic ash had the same chemical fingerprint as a massive volcanic eruption over 233,000 years ago.
VIDAL: That relies on the principle that every eruption has a unique chemical fingerprint, a unique chemical signature. So when it's possible to analyze a signature of an ash layer and if it correlates with the signature of an ash layer somewhere else and we know the age of one of the deposits, then we can guess indirectly the age of the deposits it's correlated with.
CHANG: Since Oma 1 was under that ash, Vidal thinks the bones are at least 33,000 years older than previously thought. The study was published in the journal Nature. Here's Tim White again.
WHITE: At what point did these people expand from Africa? What is their technology? What was the environment that they occupied? What was Africa like in those days? All of that depends on a strong geological framework but especially on a chronological framework. And that is what this new work has provided for one of the more complete skeletons from this time period.
SHAPIRO: In other words, if these human remains are much older than we thought, the story of humanity might be, too.
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FAQs
Some of the oldest human remains ever unearthed are the Omo One bones found in Ethiopia. For decades, their precise age has been debated, but a new study argues they're around 233,000 years old.
How old are the oldest human bones ever found? ›
The remains, known as Omo I, were found in southwest Ethiopia in the late 1960s. The bone and skull fragments researchers discovered were some of the oldest known remains of hom*o sapiens. Initial research suggested they were nearly 200,000 years old, but new research shows the remains are at least 230,000 years old.
How do scientists determine the age of human bones? ›
One scientific technique scientists will often turn to is carbon-14 dating. This technique has proved to be quite accurate for determining the age of ancient artifacts that have a biological origin, such as bones or wood or plant fibers, up to approximately 60,000 years old.
What is the oldest known modern human bones have been dated at? ›
Earliest human remains in eastern Africa dated to more than 230,000 years ago. A view of the Omo-Kibish geological formation in southwestern Ethiopia.
How do we know how old human fossils are? ›
Today, scientists use a variety of techniques to date rocks and fossils precisely. Most often, they measure the amounts of particular radioactive elements—often radiocarbon or potassium—present to determine when a rock was formed, or when an animal or plant died.
Is lucy still the oldest human fossil? ›
Scientists today announced the discovery of the oldest fossil skeleton of a human ancestor. The find reveals that our forebears underwent a previously unknown stage of evolution more than a million years before Lucy, the iconic early human ancestor specimen that walked the Earth 3.2 million years ago.
Are human bones older than dinosaurs? ›
Dinosaurs went extinct around 65 million years ago, while the earliest ancestors of modern humans appeared relatively recently in the fossil record, around 2 to 3 million years ago. Therefore, the likelihood of finding human remains alongside dinosaur fossils is extremely low.
Can you tell the age of death by bones? ›
Methods for aging adult skeletal remains typically use measurements from two bones in the pelvis: the ilium and the sacrum. [1] Since it is common for forensic anthropologists to receive incomplete skeletons that may not include the pelvis, they often rely on past experience to estimate age at death.
How do archaeologists know how old bones are? ›
One of the best-known methods of absolute dating is called radiocarbon dating. Radiocarbon dating (often written shorthand to C-14 dating) is a method for dating sites by analyzing the amount of Carbon-14 (a radioactive isotope of carbon) found in organic remains like charcoal or bones.
Where were the oldest bones in the world found? ›
Scientists determine age of some of the oldest human bones Some of the oldest human remains ever unearthed are the Omo One bones found in Ethiopia. For decades, their precise age has been debated, but a new study argues they're around 233,000 years old.
While there's no conclusive answer to this question, scientists have previously dated the earliest human remains in East Africa to less than 200,000 years ago. Now, a new archaeological study has found that fossils of hom*o sapiens emerged much earlier than previously known — at least 30,000 years earlier, to be exact.
How old is the human race? ›
Fossils and DNA suggest people looking like us, anatomically modern hom*o sapiens, evolved around 300,000 years ago. Surprisingly, archaeology – tools, artefacts, cave art – suggest that complex technology and cultures, “behavioural modernity”, evolved more recently: 50,000-65,000 years ago.
Who are the oldest humans on Earth? ›
The oldest known living person is Maria Branyas of Spain (born in the USA), aged 117 years, 54 days. The oldest known living man is John Tinniswood of the United Kingdom, aged 111 years, 245 days. The 100 oldest women have, on average, lived several years longer than the 100 oldest men.
Did humans and dinosaurs coexist? ›
After the dinosaurs died out, nearly 65 million years passed before people appeared on Earth. However, small mammals (including shrew-sized primates) were alive at the time of the dinosaurs.
Are humans still evolving? ›
A group of closely-related organisms that have common physical and genetic characteristics and are able to interbreed to produce fertile offspring. As humans, we experience dramatically fewer hazards today than we did in our early evolution. However, genetic studies indicate that we are still evolving.
How do we know dinosaurs are 65 million years old? ›
Actually, dinosaurs lived from around 250 million years ago, to about 65 million years ago. Scientists know this because that's the age of the rocks in which dinosaur fossils are found.
What is the oldest body remains found? ›
The oldest ever remains of what appear to be anatomically modern humans were found in Morocco, and are believed to be about 360,000 years old - but it is not a certainty that they actually belong to humans rather than a closely related species.
Can bones last 2000 years? ›
Bones do decay, eventually. They are made of a harder, more dense material than other organs and soft tissue. It just takes a much longer time. The bones that are unearthed that are thousands and millions of years old are no longer bones.
How old are the very oldest body fossils on Earth? ›
The oldest known fossils, in fact, are cyanobacteria from Archaean rocks of western Australia, dated 3.5 billion years old. This may be somewhat surprising, since the oldest rocks are only a little older: 3.8 billion years old!
What is the oldest human bones found in the United States? ›
Arlington Springs Man was a Paleo-Indian whose remains were found in 1959 on Santa Rosa Island, one of the Channel Islands located off the coast of Southern California.
