What Did the First Homo Sapiens Look Like? Scientists Rebuild a 315,000-Year-Old Face From Morocco

Quick answer: A team led by Brazilian 3D designer Cícero Moraes has built a digital face for the oldest known fossils of our species, the roughly 315,000-year-old Homo sapiens remains from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco. Published in the peer-reviewed journal Heritage, the reconstruction is based on a composite skull assembled by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology from several individuals. It shows a broad, robust face with a projecting jaw that would not look out of place today, sitting on a skull whose brain volume falls within the modern human range. The skin colour and hair in the colour version are artistic choices: no fossil can preserve them.

The fossils from Jebel Irhoud reshaped the timeline of our species in 2017, pushing its known origins back by at least 100,000 years. Now, for the first time, a peer-reviewed study has tried to put a face to them. Here is what the scientists did, what the face can and cannot tell us, and why these bones from a Moroccan hillside matter so much.

What is Jebel Irhoud?

Jebel Irhoud is an archaeological site in Morocco that was once a cave. In the early 1960s, a worker extracting minerals there found a skull with human-like features. According to the new study in Heritage, it was first identified as an African variant of Neanderthal, about 40,000 years old. That skull became known as Irhoud 1.

Its age was revised several times. Estimates moved to between 100,000 and 200,000 years in 1991 and to around 160,000 years in 2007. Then, in June 2017, two papers in Nature transformed the site’s importance.

The 2017 discovery that rewrote our origins

A team led by Jean-Jacques Hublin of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) in Leipzig described new fossils from Jebel Irhoud and classified the remains as early Homo sapiens. A companion paper led by Daniel Richter dated the fossil layer using thermoluminescence on flints that had been heated in ancient fires, arriving at about 315,000 years, with an uncertainty of around 34,000 years.

The Max Planck Institute summed up the result: the finds push back the origins of our species by about 100,000 years. The fossils also revealed an intriguing mix. Their faces already looked modern and fall within the variation of people living today, but their braincases were longer and more archaic in shape. The researchers concluded that brain shape, and possibly brain function, kept evolving within the Homo sapiens lineage after the face had taken its modern form.

The Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program explains why the find matters beyond Morocco. The Irhoud fossils combine large teeth and a long braincase typical of earlier human species with a face, forehead and jaw most like ours, and they suggest our species evolved over a much wider area than previously thought, with early populations across Africa interacting for hundreds of thousands of years.

How do you rebuild a face from 315,000-year-old bones?

There is no complete skull of a single person from Jebel Irhoud. In 2017, MPI-EVA researchers created a digital composite from micro-CT scans of several fossils from the same archaeological layer, known as Layer 7, and released images and video of it under a Creative Commons licence. According to the Heritage paper, the braincase and upper face come from Irhoud 1, the mandible comes from another adult (Irhoud 11), and the upper teeth region was completed with material from Irhoud 10 and other dental fragments.

The authors, Cícero Moraes, Elena Varotto, Michael E. Habicht, Francesco Maria Galassi, Lis Moura and Johari Yap Abdullah, then worked in four main steps:

1. Rebuilding the skull in 3D. They extracted frames from the Max Planck video and used photogrammetry to turn the overlapping views into a three-dimensional model, then scaled it against measurements published for the fossils.
2. Deforming a modern head to fit. They took a CT scan of an anonymised modern adult (the “virtual donor”) and digitally reshaped the donor’s skull to match the ancient one. The soft tissues of the donor’s face moved with it, giving a first estimate of the face.
3. Refining with tissue data. They checked and adjusted the result with soft-tissue thickness measurements from living people, choosing reference data from people of African ancestry because of their closer geographic and evolutionary relevance.
4. Finishing two versions. One is a neutral grayscale face with no hair, designed to show the anatomy. The other adds skin colour, hair and a beard for public communication.

All of this was done with free, open-source software: Blender and the OrtogOnBlender add-on, which Moraes develops. The study says the same anatomical deformation method has been used and tested since at least 2013, including on historical individuals and real forensic cases.

What the reconstructed face shows

“As for the individual from Jebel Irhoud, he might go unnoticed in a crowd, but a closer look would reveal something that sets him apart from the rest – most notably his robust features and a projecting jaw,” Moraes told ScienceAlert.

The measurements back that up. In the composite skull, the width of the upper face, measured between the outer rims of the eye sockets, is about 118 mm, against an average of 96.6 mm in the modern reference population, roughly 4.75 standard deviations above it. The width across the angles of the jaw, about 106 mm, is also larger than the modern average of 96.9 mm. The head circumference estimated from the reconstructed face is 60 cm, above the adult male average of 56.4 cm used for comparison.

A brain the size of ours

Rebuilding the skull also let the team model the space inside it. The endocranial volume came out at 1,364 millilitres, very close to the 1,375 ml calculated by Max Planck researchers directly from CT data of the fossil in a 2018 study in Science Advances. Converted to brain volume, the study’s figure is about 1,230 cm³, practically the same as the modern adult male average of 1,234 cm³ it cites. In other words, the brain was already modern in size, even if the braincase was a different shape. The 2018 study concluded that the rounder, “globular” brain shape of people today evolved gradually within our species, reaching its present range only between about 100,000 and 35,000 years ago.

How accurate is it?

The authors are unusually explicit about the limits, and it is worth repeating them:

• It is a composite. The skull combines parts of several individuals, so the face is not a portrait of one person. Moraes told ScienceAlert that the mandible and teeth from another individual “fit remarkably well.”
• Soft tissue is borrowed from modern humans. No skin or muscle survives from Middle Pleistocene people, so tissue data from living people is a necessary stand-in, not proof that ancient faces were built the same way.
• Colour and hair are interpretation. Moraes said the colourised image, with facial hair, “is the most artistic version and contains fewer scientifically robust features.” The grayscale version exists precisely so viewers can judge the shape without those choices.
• No direct validation is possible. The paper describes the result as “a morphologically plausible approximation,” not a definitive reconstruction.

To make the work checkable, the team compared its skull with an independent 3D scan made by another person and published the files for download, so other researchers can test the fit for themselves.

Why a face matters

Fossil measurements are hard to relate to. A face is not. The study argues that the grayscale version keeps the scientific rigour, while the colour version reaches people who would never read a paper on endocranial volumes. Both are a reminder that the first members of our species, living in what is now Morocco more than 300,000 years ago, were people we might recognise.

If you enjoy deep-time stories, read how a Neanderthal shoulder blade may hold the oldest evidence of a spear attack, how divers found the world’s oldest known shipwreck off Turkey, and how astronomers traced a supernova our ancestors saw in 1181. More in our Science section.

Frequently asked questions

How old are the Jebel Irhoud fossils?

About 315,000 years old, with an uncertainty of around 34,000 years, according to thermoluminescence dating published in Nature in 2017. They are the oldest known fossils attributed to Homo sapiens.

Who reconstructed the Jebel Irhoud face?

Brazilian 3D designer Cícero Moraes and co-authors Elena Varotto, Michael E. Habicht, Francesco Maria Galassi, Lis Moura and Johari Yap Abdullah. Their study was published in the journal Heritage in September 2026.

Is the reconstruction an exact portrait?

No. It is based on a composite skull made from several individuals and uses soft-tissue data from modern humans. The authors call it a morphologically plausible approximation, and say skin colour and hair in the colour version are artistic.

Did early Homo sapiens have brains as big as ours?

In size, yes. The reconstructed skull has an endocranial volume of 1,364 ml, within the modern human range. Its braincase was more elongated, however, which suggests brain shape kept evolving after the species appeared.

Why are fossils from Morocco important for human origins?

They show that Homo sapiens existed in North Africa about 315,000 years ago, roughly 100,000 years earlier than previously documented. That supports the view that our species emerged across Africa rather than in one region.

Sources: Moraes et al., Heritage (2026); ScienceAlert; Hublin et al., Nature (2017); Richter et al., Nature (2017); Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology; Neubauer et al., Science Advances (2018); Smithsonian Human Origins Program.

Featured image: cast of the Jebel Irhoud 1 skull at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, by Ryan Somma, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.