Hofmeyr Skull - Analysis

Analysis

The Hofmeyr fossil was compared with skulls from Sub-Saharan Africa, including those of the Khoisan, who are geographically close to the site of the find. Using 3-dimensional measurement and mapping techniques, team member Katerina Harvati of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, found that the Hofmeyr Skull is actually quite distinct from those found in Sub-Saharan Africans. This assertion is made with 95% confidence. The skull's features were found to have a very close affinity with the Cro-magnon people, who lived in Eurasia in the Upper Paleolithic period when the skull's owner lived.

Alan Morris said that the skull's owner "would not look like modern Africans or like modern Europeans, or like modern Khoisan people, but he is definitely a modern human being".

The skull demonstrates that humans in Africa 36,000 years ago resembled those in Eurasia. This evidence supports the recent single-origin hypothesis, which suggests that anatomically modern humans evolved in Africa before 200,000 to 100,000 years ago, with members of one branch leaving Africa between 65,000 and 25,000 years ago, spreading to the rest of the world and replacing other Homo species already there.