Herto Homo sapiens (idaltu)
Homo sapiens de Herto
- Date
- 1997-2003 · confidence high
- Place
- Herto Bouri, Middle Awash, Afar, Ethiopia
- Credited to
- Tim White, Berhane Asfaw and the Middle Awash team
- People
- 👤 Berhane Asfaw1954–👤 Tim White1950–
- Field
- Life & health
What was discovered
Skulls from around 160,000 years ago with modern features and marks of ritual defleshing. They reinforced the African origin of Homo sapiens.
Published in Nature (2003) as the subspecies Homo sapiens idaltu, a term now little used.
What it led to
- confirmation of the recent African origin hypothesis
- early evidence of the treatment of the dead
- the chronology of archaic Homo sapiens