Overview
- An international team reports three mandibles, teeth, vertebrae and other fragments from Casablanca’s Grotte à Hominidés, published in Nature and presented in Rabat.
- The fossils were securely dated to about 773,000 years with ~4,000‑year precision by anchoring the sediment layer to the Matuyama–Brunhes magnetic reversal.
- Anatomy shows a mosaic of archaic and derived traits, leading authors to place the group within an evolved Homo erectus sensu lato without naming a new species.
- The find fills a long-standing gap in Africa’s mid‑Pleistocene record that overlaps estimates for the last common ancestor of Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans.
- Taphonomy indicates a carnivore den context with hyena bite marks on a femur, and comparisons with Atapuerca’s Homo antecessor prompt calls for further regional analyses.