Dr. Helena Malmström conducting on-site sampling of bone material in a mobile sampling lab pictured in this handout photo obtained by Reuters September 28, 2017. Mattias Jakobsson/Handout via REUTERS
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Genetic data from the skeletal remains of seven people who lived centuries ago in South Africa's KwaZulu-Natal Province is offering intriguing new evidence that our species, Homo sapiens, is older than previously believed.
Scientists said on Thursday they sequenced the genomes of the seven individuals including a boy who lived as a hunter-gatherer at Ballito Bay roughly 2,000 years ago. In doing so, they were able to estimate that the evolutionary split between Homo sapiens and ancestral human groups occurred 260,000 to 350,000 years ago.
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