n September 13, 2026, the journal Heritage published a digital facial approximation of the Jebel Irhoud hominin, whose fossils, dated to about 315,000 years ago, are the oldest attributed to Homo sapiens. Signed by Brazilian facial reconstruction specialist Cicero Moraes with researchers from Flinders University in Australia, the University of Pavia in Italy and Universiti Sains Malaysia, the study starts from the composite skull that the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig released under an open license in 2017. The skull belongs to no single man: the braincase and upper face are those of Irhoud 1, uncovered in 1961 during mineral extraction, the lower jaw comes from Irhoud 11 and the upper dental arch from Irhoud 10, all from the same layer of the site. Using open-source software, the authors deformed a CT scan of a present-day adult until it fit the fossil’s geometry.
The exercise also yields measurements. The resulting endocast reaches 1,364 milliliters, within the 1,305 to 1,480 range that earlier studies drew from the fossil itself; converted to brain volume, it gives 1,230 cubic centimeters, barely below the average for today’s adult men, put at 1,234. The face, by contrast, belongs to another time: about 118 mm separate the outer rims of the orbits, against an average of 96.6 mm today, and head circumference reaches 60 cm, against 56.4 cm. The authors set a grayscale version, faithful to the bones alone, apart from a colored one whose skin and hair are artistic interpretation. The brain of the first Homo sapiens had thus already reached our size, though not yet our features, and Jebel Irhoud will remain the place where the species shows its oldest face.
Photo: Ryan Somma, CC BY-SA 2.0.
