Fossils from beneath modern Casablanca
A study published in Nature on 7 January 2026 describes hominin fossils from the Grotte 脿 Hominid茅s at Thomas Quarry I in Casablanca, Morocco. The collection includes two partial lower jaws, teeth, vertebrae and part of a femur. The researchers date the fossil-bearing deposits to about 773,000 years ago, a poorly documented period close to the estimated separation of the lineages that later produced Homo sapiens in Africa and Neanderthals and Denisovans in Eurasia.
Thomas Quarry is not a newly discovered locality. A mandible was found there in 1969, and controlled excavations between 1994 and 2015 recovered additional material in a clear stratigraphic setting. The new work brings the fossils, geology and comparative anatomy together. That context matters because an isolated fossil without a reliable layer can be difficult to place in human evolution.
How the age was established
The team used magnetostratigraphy, reading reversals preserved in the magnetic orientation of minerals in the sediments. The relevant layers sit near the Matuyama-Brunhes reversal, when Earth's magnetic field changed polarity about 773,000 years ago. The researchers report a nominal age of 773,000 years with an uncertainty of about 4,000 years. Mammal fossils in the sequence provide an independent biochronological check consistent with an Early Pleistocene age.
This method dates the geological context rather than measuring the age of each bone directly. Several specimens came from controlled layers, while the original 1969 jaw was recovered from disturbed material below the cave. The authors connect it to the same deposit using the site history and anatomical comparisons, but they explicitly discuss the uncertainty in its exact original position.
A mixture of older and later traits
The jaws and teeth do not fit neatly into a named modern-looking species. They retain primitive features seen in earlier Homo, while other details resemble traits that became more common in later African and Eurasian populations. The study describes the population as probably an evolved form of Homo erectus in a broad sense. It is morphologically distinct from the similarly aged Homo antecessor fossils at Gran Dolina in Spain.
Those differences are informative. They suggest that regional differentiation between northwestern Africa and Europe was already present by this time. Some shared dental and mandibular traits also keep open questions about population contacts across the western Mediterranean, but fossils alone do not demonstrate a Strait of Gibraltar crossing.
What the evolutionary analysis supports
Genetic estimates place the common ancestral population of living humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans roughly between 765,000 and 550,000 years ago. Ancient DNA this old is generally not preserved in warm North African environments, so morphology and geology carry much of the evidence. In comparative shape analyses, the Thomas Quarry fossils fall near the expected divergence between an African lineage leading toward Homo sapiens and Eurasian lineages leading toward Neanderthals and Denisovans.
This makes the Maghreb central to the story of human origins rather than a geographic margin. Morocco already holds the Jebel Irhoud Homo sapiens fossils, dated to roughly 300,000 years ago. The Thomas Quarry material extends the regional record back by almost half a million years and supplies a possible view of populations preceding our species.
What scientists cannot claim yet
The fossils are not identified as direct ancestors of every later human, and they do not establish a single birthplace for Homo sapiens. Evolution proceeds through branching and mixing populations, while the African fossil record for this interval remains sparse. Similar anatomy can also arise through inheritance, body-size effects or convergent evolution.
More fossils from securely dated African sites are needed to test the proposed position. Three-dimensional scans, dental tissue measurements and comparisons with discoveries elsewhere may refine it. The firm advance is the combination of a rich anatomical sample and an unusually strong date: hominins with a distinctive mosaic of traits lived at Casablanca around 773,000 years ago.
