THE discovery of a fossil more than 50 years ago has changed everything we thought about where our forefathers came from. AN "OBSESSION" with the lower jaw of a long-dead human, unearthed in the 1960s at a prehistoric Moroccan campsite, led palaeoanthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin to the discovery of a lifetime. After decades of work to identify the jawbone's owner, Mr Hublin was able to announce Wednesday that it belonged to the earliest known member of our species. His efforts revealed that Homo sapiens is 100,000 years older than previously assumed — ageing our species by a whole third and dislodging East Africa as the cradle of humankind. It was in 1961 that mining activity at the site called Jebel Irhoud, not far from Marrakesh, first brought an ancient human skull to the surface, followed by more fragments over subsequent years of excavation. Initially, the pieces were dated to about 40,000 years ago, later pushed back to 160,000 years ago. At the time, the notion that humans