Some of the skulls features are "archaic", meaning that they are consistent with the craniums of Eurasians from the Upper Palaeolithic era rather than of humans today.
The Upper Palaeolithic, also called the Old Stone Age, ran from around 40,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago. It is considered a key period in the human odyssey, coinciding with the emergence of new stone tools, weapons and cave paintings.
Anatomically modern humans are thought to have appeared in sub-Saharan Africa around 200,000 years ago.
East Africa's Rift Valley, where H. sapiens remains dating back 160,000 years have been found, is widely considered the place where it all began.
So if the Hofmeyr dating is right, it means our forebears headed south out of the Rift Valley as well as north, migrating to southern Africa as well as to the Middle East and Eurasia.
Another option would be that the cradle of H. sapiens is southern Africa, and that the migration was all northbound — although there is no fossil evidence to back this.
Apart from some early sites in the Middle East, until now the oldest evidence of modern humans out of Africa has been in Australia, from around 50,000 years ago, according to Hoffecker.
