PEOPLING
The Florisbad Skull
~260,000 years ago
Palaeolithic · Middle Stone Age · MIS 8
A partial skull from a South African spring, about 260,000 years old, mixes archaic and modern features and sits near the root of our species.
The Florisbad skull is a partial human fossil recovered in 1932 from the deposits of a thermal spring at Florisbad, in what is now the Free State province of South Africa. It combines a brow ridge heavier than that of present-day humans with a face flatter and broader than those of earlier species. A molar attributed to the same individual was directly dated by electron spin resonance, a method that measures the dose of natural radiation a tissue has received since it formed, the accumulation being proportional to elapsed time. It gives about 259,000 years, which would make the fossil one of the oldest representatives of our lineage in southern Africa, provided that the tooth and the skull belong to the same individual.
Why it matters
The case illustrates how thin the series available for the study of the species' origins are, resting as it does on one skull, one tooth and their presumed association. The date applies to the tooth; the tooth is attributed to the skull; if that attribution is set aside, the age of the skull is no longer constrained. The taxonomic attribution is disputed as well, between an early Homo sapiens and a separate species, Homo helmei. On either hypothesis, the fossil documents the southern end of the argument that the characters of the species came together at continental scale rather than in a single place.
Dating & uncertaintyDisputed
The age of 259,000 ± 35,000 years comes from an electron spin resonance measurement on a single molar found at the spring, not on the skull itself. A review published in 2023 defends the estimate while reporting the challenge raised against it: if the tooth does not belong to the same individual as the skull, the age of the latter remains undetermined.
Our species’ history as one day
04:11:2519 h 49 min before midnight
if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day