(dramatic music) - [Narrator] Several decades after the initial discoveries came a breakthrough.

(dramatic music) Archeologists uncovered another 16 fossils, (dramatic music) all with the same blend of features, (dramatic music) and taken together with the old finds.

A fuller picture started to emerge.

(dramatic music continues) (both speaking in a foreign language) - [Narrator] With each new find, the evidence grew.

(dramatic music continues) These were not some other species but homo sapiens with hints of an earlier ancestor.

(dramatic music) But it wasn't until archeologists were able to more accurately date the remains that the final piece of the puzzle fell into place.

(dramatic music continues) - The archeologists, using new and improved dating techniques, were able to give us dates for these fossils, and they tell us that these individuals lived about 300,000 years ago.

And that is mind-boggling because we thought our species was only about 200,000 years old.

What these fossils tell us is that our species, homo sapiens, is 100,000 years older than we thought.

We are much older than we realized.

This fossil went from being an enigmatic and basically, a mystery to being one of the most important fossils in our whole field.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] Thousands of miles from East Africa where many anthropologists thought we began and far older than expected, (suspenseful music) these are the earliest homo sapiens ever found, and they have forced us to rethink other finds across Africa, (intense music) which are painting an entirely new picture of our origins.

Suggesting Jebel Irhoud (intense music) was just one of many emerging homo sapiens populations.

(gentle music)