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60 years ago, Miners stumbled across a cave in the rocky, bone-dry uplands of Western

Morocco, some 35 miles from the Atlantic.

In the wall of the cave, the miners found a skull, a very old one.

Thinking little of the discovery, an engineer kept the skull as a souvenir.

A year or so later, researchers led an expedition to the site, called Jebel Ihoud, to see if

there might be anything else of note.

There was.

Over the subsequent decades, excavators found dozens of animal bones, some of which had

been butchered and cooked, belonging to more than 30 separate species.

They found stone tools, including scrapers, hand axes, and spearheads.

Most importantly, they found more human bones.

First, a hit bone and a humerus, the bone that runs from the shoulder to the elbow, then

later a partial skull, a jawbone, and various parts of the limbs belonging to five different

individuals.

It was obvious that these remains were old.

The assembly of animal remains pointed to a date of around 160,000 years before the

present.

Researchers thought they probably belonged to Neanderthals, or extinct but closely related

cousins, since the tools looked like what you'd find on a Neanderthal site.

Until recently, options for determining the age of a site like this were limited.

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