Jebel Irhoud
Sign in to savearchaeological site in Morocco
Key facts
- Periods
- Lower Paleolithic
- Associated with
- Homo sapiens
- Location
- East of Safi / northwest from Marakech
- Region
- Morocco
- Height
- 592 m (1,942 ft)
- Excavation dates
- 1961, 1967 & 1969; (JT & dBdH), 1991
via Wikipedia infobox
~20 min read
Encyclopedic overview
Jebel Irhoud (Arabic: جبل إيغود, Moroccan Arabic: žbəl iġud) or Adrar n Ighoud (Standard Moroccan Tamazight: ⴰⴷⵔⴰⵔ ⵏ ⵉⵖⵓⴷ, romanized: Adrar n Iɣud), is an archaeological site in Morocco located just north of the town of Tlet Ighoud in Youssoufia Province, approximately 50 km (30 mi) south-east of the city of Safi.
It is noted for the hominin fossils that have been found there since the discovery of the site in 1961. Originally thought to be Neanderthals, the specimens have since been assigned to Homo sapiens and, as reported in 2017, have been dated to a "weighted average age" of 315,000 years ago. This makes the remains by far the earliest known examples of H. sapiens, and suggests that rather than arising in East Africa approximately 200,000 years ago, modern humans have been present across the length of Africa 100,000 years earlier.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Jebel Irhoud” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.
On the map
Available in 32 languages
- Español
- Français
- Deutsch
- 日本語
- Русский
- Português
- Italiano
- العربية
- Azerbaijani
- Bahasa Indonesia
- Catalan
- Egyptian Arabic
- Esperanto
- Finnish
- Lithuanian
- Malay
- Moroccan Arabic
- Nederlands
Show 13 more
via Wikidata sitelinks · CC0