Morocco's Ministry of Youth, Communication, and Culture announced on Wednesday the discovery of ancient human remains inside a cave at the 'Thomas Quarry 1' in Casablanca, dating back approximately 773,000 years, as part of the Moroccan-French research program 'Prehistory of Casablanca'.

According to a ministry statement, a study published in the journal Nature includes the new findings, which comprise two jaws from adults and one from a child, along with tooth remains and parts of the skeleton, showing a mix of Homo erectus characteristics and more modern traits.

The researchers confirmed that the precise dating, based on magnetic stratigraphic analysis, makes this site one of the most time-reliable African sites, helping to fill an important gap in the fossil record, reinforcing the hypothesis of deep African roots for the evolution of Homo sapiens and the role of North Africa in the major stages of human evolution.

Homo sapiens lineage

The fossilized bones and teeth, discovered in a Moroccan cave and dating back 773,000 years, provide a deeper understanding of the emergence of the Homo sapiens lineage, which scientists believe may have been 'the ancestors of our genus.'

The researchers said that the fossils, consisting of lower jaw bones from two adults and a young child, as well as teeth, a thigh bone, and some vertebrae, were discovered in a cave known as 'Cave of Hominins' at a site near Casablanca.

The cave appears to have been a shelter for predators, as the thigh bone bears bite marks suggesting the person may have been hunted or their body scavenged by hyenas.

According to Reuters, the researchers said the most fitting interpretation is that these fossils represent an evolved form of the ancient lineage Homo erectus, which first appeared about 1.9 million years ago in Africa and later spread to Europe and Asia.

The bones and teeth show a mix of primitive and more modern features and fill a gap in the African fossil record from about one million to 600,000 years ago.

Hominins

The researchers say the fossils may represent an African population that existed shortly before the evolutionary split of lineages leading to the emergence of Homo sapiens in Africa and two other hominins, Neanderthals and Denisovans, who inhabited Eurasia.

Jean-Jacques Hublin, a paleoanthropologist from the Collège de France in Paris and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, said: 'I would be cautious about classifying it as the last common ancestor, but it is reasonably close to the lineages from which the African lineage, Homo sapiens, and the Eurasian ones, Neanderthals and Denisovans, ultimately emerged.'

Hublin is the lead author of the study published on Wednesday in the scientific journal Nature.

Also, the oldest known fossils of Homo sapiens, dating back about 315,000 years, were found in Morocco at an archaeological site called Jebel Irhoud.