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The Ministry of Youth, Culture and Communication of the Kingdom of Morocco announces that, within the framework of the Franco-Moroccan program “Prehistory of Casablanca,” an institutional collaboration between the National Institute of Archaeological Sciences and Heritage (INSAP) of the Ministry of Youth, Culture and Communication/Department of Culture of the Kingdom of Morocco and the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs through the French archaeological mission “Casablanca,” and co-directed by Abderrahim Mohib (INSAP), Rosalia Gallotti (University of Montpellier Paul Valéry & LabEx Archimède), and Camille Daujeard (MNHN/CNRS – HNHP), a study was published in the journal Nature on January 7. In 2026, an international research team presented the analysis of new hominin fossils unearthed in a cavity at the Thomas I quarry in Casablanca, Morocco.
The studied material, which includes several human mandibles, including those of two adults and a child, as well as dental and postcranial remains, combines archaic characteristics observed in Homo erectus with more modern derived traits.
Magnetostratigraphic analysis, with unprecedented resolution for a site containing hominin remains, allowed for the dating of these fossils with extraordinary precision. The sediments that fill the cavity and contain the fossil remains provided a high-resolution record of the Matuyama-Brunhes magnetic reversal, dated to 773,000 years ago, thus providing one of the most precise and robust ages for a site containing human remains.
The collection documents human populations that were still poorly understood during this pivotal period, situated between the earliest forms of the genus Homo and more recent lineages.
These discoveries fill a significant gap in the African fossil record, at a time when paleogenetic data place the divergence between the African lineage leading to Homo sapiens and the Eurasian lineages that gave rise to Neanderthals and Denisovans. The fossils exhibit a unique combination of primitive and more evolved characteristics, reflecting human populations close to this phase of divergence.
They thus confirm the antiquity and depth of our species’ African roots, while highlighting the key role of North Africa in the major stages of human evolution.
These human fossils, unearthed in the Hominid Cave within the Thomas I quarry near Casablanca, Morocco, shed new light on a key period in human evolution, approximately 773,000 years ago.
Thanks to precise dating based on recordings of the Earth’s magnetic field, these remains can be placed with high chronological reliability within the early history of human populations in Africa. They shed light on the emergence of the Homo sapiens lineage and reinforce the idea that its deep roots are African.
The study was conducted and supported by a team of researchers from the National Institute of Archaeological Sciences and Heritage (Morocco); the Directorate of Cultural Heritage (Morocco), the Collège de France, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Germany), the University of Montpellier Paul Valéry (France), the Università degli Studi di Milano (Italy), the University of Bordeaux and the National Museum of Natural History (France).
