When the light left the LMC on its journey to our eyes, mankind was at the start of the long march to modernity

In 2003 scientists unearthed three skulls in Ethiopia’s fossil-rich Afar region that are around 160,000 years old. They are the nearly complete skulls of an adult male and a child (based on the presence of unerupted teeth the skull is of a child of six or seven), and the partial skull of a second adult. These skulls are the oldest known fossils of modern humans’ immediate predecessors for they represent a crucial stage of human evolution when primitive hominids were beginning to evolve into homo sapiens.

This skull of an adult male from Ethiopia is about 160,000 years old, but it already looks like that of a modern human.

By comparing the skulls with 6,000 others from around the world, the scientists concluded that the most complete adult skull was clearly a Homo sapiens, with the vault of its braincase shaped like a pentagon, a wide upper face, and a moderately domed forehead. It also had divided brow ridges and a flat midface like modern humans. A few primitive features, such as a flexed bone at the rear of the braincase and protruding brows, link it with more ancient African fossils.

Tim White, a University of California, Berkeley paleontologist who was co-leader of the international team that excavated and analysed the skulls said, “They’re not quite completely modern, but they’re well on their way. They’re close enough to call Homo sapiens. With these new crania, we can see what our direct ancestors looked like.”

The fossils fill a major gap in the human fossil record. “We’ve lacked intermediate fossils between pre-humans and modern humans, between 100,000 and 300,000 years ago,”  White said. “Now the fossil record meshes with the molecular evidence.”

According to F. Clark Howell, a professor emeritus of integrative biology at UC Berkeley and a co-author of the Nature article, “The Herto fossils are unmistakably non-neanderthal and show that near-humans had evolved in Africa long before the European neanderthals disappeared. They demonstrate conclusively that there was never a neanderthal stage in human evolution.”

The conclusion, researchers stated, is that these fossils represent a transition from more primitive African hominids to modern humans supports the “Out of Africa” hypothesis that modern humans evolved in Africa and not in multiple regions of the world. Researchers placed the fossils in the same genus and species as modern humans but appended a subspecies name – Homo sapiens idaltu (idàltu, means “elder” in the Afar language) to differentiate them from contemporary humans, Homo sapiens sapiens.

They also found more than 600 stone tools of the same age scattered across the area, along with the butchered bones of hippopotamuses (these ancient people clearly had a taste for hippos, but scientists can’t tell whether they were killing them or scavenging them). Geologists and paleontologists have established that the people lived near the shore of a shallow freshwater lake with abundant catfish, crocodiles and hippopotamuses at a time when much of Europe was buried in ice during a major glaciation. White said the site was probably a seasonal foraging ground for the humans.

During the time that the Large Magellanic Cloud’s light was making its 163,000-year cosmic journey to our eyes, our intellectual capacity has evolved from those near-homo sapiens using chipped stone tools to butcher the carcasses of hippos, to us homo sapiens sitting at telescopes and peering into the furthest reaches of our universe and contemplating its – and our own – existence.