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The Ādam Paradox Hypothesis 9
Strand One: The African Fossils — Bodies Before Symbols
Jebel Irhoud (~315 ka): Modern Faces, Archaic Brains
In 2017, a re-dating of fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, shocked the
field. The bones—originally thought to be Neanderthal-like—turned out to
be ~315,000 years old, making them the oldest known Homo sapiens (Hublin
et al., 2017).
Their faces were flat and delicate,
“almost indistinguishable from ours,
” as
Jean-Jacques Hublin put it (Hublin, 2017, Nature interview).
Their brain cases, however, were long and low, not the rounded, globular
vaults of present-day humans.
The associated stone tools were Levallois flakes: efficient, standardized, but
strictly functional. No beads, engravings, or pigments accompanied them.
The Irhoud fossils say it clearly: anatomy was modern, cognition was
silent.
Omo Kibish (~195 ka): The First Modern Skeleton
At Omo Kibish in Ethiopia,
“Omo I”
was uncovered in 1967, but it was
only in 2005 that new dating confirmed its astonishing age: ~195,000 years
(McDougall et al., 2005).
The skull has a rounded cranium, high forehead, and chin—all unmistakably
modern.
Christopher Stringer commented:
“Omo I is so modern that if you
reburied him and dug him up today, you would call him Homo sapiens
without hesitation” (Stringer, 2016, p. 34).
And yet, as with Jebel Irhoud, the cultural layer around Omo I reveals no
symbols—no ochre, no ornaments, no engravings.