In the early 1960s, a worker extracting minerals at Jebel Irhoud, in Morocco, uncovered a skull with strikingly human features.

Named Irhoud 1, the fossil was initially identified as an African Neanderthal variant about 40,000 years old.

Later dating studies pushed the age of the find back, to between 100,000 and 200,000 years in 1991 and to about 160,000 years in 2007.

In 2017, two studies reclassified Irhoud 1 and associated remains as Homo sapiens and gave them an age of roughly 315,000 years, making them the oldest known representatives of the species.

“In 2017, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) publicly released image and video data regarding the three-dimensional digital reconstruction of the Jebel Irhoud skull,” said corresponding author Dr. Johari Yap Abdullah, a researcher at the Universiti Sains Malaysia and Saveetha University, and his colleagues.

“The three-dimensional model in question constitutes a composite skull, structured through the spatial integration of multiple specimens excavated from the same stratigraphic unit.”

The MPI-EVA model is dominated by the Irhoud 1 fossil, the original 1961 find, which supplies the braincase and upper face.

A mandible from another individual, Irhoud 11, and fragments from other specimens fill the gaps...