Editor's note

Piece by piece, study by study, scientists put together a timeline of where and how our earliest ancestors evolved. And new research published overnight may shake up the existing view completely.

As one of the researchers, Renaud Joannes-Boyau, explains, 300,000 year-old human remains and stone tools found in Morocco are the earliest dated evidence of modern humans, Homo sapiens. With narrow faces reminiscent of our own, these ‘people’ appear to have lived across Africa and perhaps even coexisted with other hominid species 100,000 years earlier than previously thought.

Meanwhile in the UK, voters are about to head to the polls to vote for their next government. As Ben Wellings writes, it is by no means the foregone conclusion it was when Theresa May called the election.

And if you haven’t already, there’s still time to make a tax deductible donation to our annual reader campaign, which ends soon.

Sarah Keenihan

Section Editor, Science and Technology

Top story

Just like us, but different: recently-discovered Homo sapiens fossils have a modern face, but an ancient brain case. Philipp Gunz, MPI EVA Leipzig

New Moroccan fossils suggest humans lived and evolved across Africa 100,000 years earlier than we thought

Renaud Joannes-Boyau, Southern Cross University

New paired research papers have pushed back by 100,000 years the time frame in which humans, or _Homo sapiens_ are thought to have lived in Africa.

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