The age of modern humans seems to get pushed back by archaeology. The latest is that finds in a defunct volcano in Kenya indicate that stone projectile weapons were being used some 320,000 years ago:
“STONE tools and other items from ancient sites in Kenya give a glimpse at the emergence of some key human behaviours, perhaps including a building of relationships with distant neighbours, new research says. Scientists can’t be sure whether the objects were made by our species, Homo sapiens, or some close relative that’s now extinct. But at about 320,000 years old, they’re roughly the same age or a bit older than the earliest known H. sapient fossils, which appeared in Morocco. In any case, they show “foundations of the origin of modern human behaviour,” says Richard Potts of the Smithsonian Institution, one of the researchers reporting the find in three papers released Thursday by the journal Science. The tools are much smaller and more sophisticated than the older, teardrop-shaped stone tools found in the same area in southern Kenya. Some were made of a volcanic rock, obsidian, that didn’t come from the area, meaning the toolmakers travelled miles to get it. And, those excursions must have led them to encounter groups of H. sapient or our close evolutionary relatives.”
http://www.news.com.au/technology/science/archaeology/stone-tools-from-kenya-give-early-glimpse-of-human-behaviour/news-story/5e50bc801e95f2a97345a129a77d47df
Here is further information, and from another site:
http://www.amerika.org/politics/europeans-have-existed-for-longer-than-previously-thought/
“Until recently, H. sapiens was thought to have evolved approximately 200,000 years ago in East Africa. This estimate was shaped by the discovery in 1967 of the oldest remains attributed to H. sapiens, at a site in Ethiopia’s Omo Valley. The remains, made up of two skulls (Omo 1 and Omo 2), had initially been dated to 130,000 years ago, but through the application of more-sophisticated dating techniques in 2005, the remains were more accurately dated to 195,000 years ago. In June 2017, however, all of this changed. A multiyear excavation led by Jean-Jacques Hublin of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, revealed that H. sapiens was present at Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, more than 5,000 km (3,100 miles) away from East Africa (the region many paleontologists call “the cradle of humankind”).
The team unearthed a collection of specimens that was made up of skull fragments and a complete jawbone (both of which were strikingly similar to those of modern human beings) as well as stone tools—all of which dated to about 315,000 years ago, more than 100,000 years earlier than the remains found at Omo. Although this discovery has not yet convinced all paleontologists, it suggests that the species could have been widely dispersed throughout North Africa much earlier than they expected and that East Africa might not have been the only cradle."
Whole careers have been based on the idea that the races (which don’t exist) are mere modern constructs. This idea is becoming increasing difficult to hold, like a conceptual fish covered in oil.