Archaeologists uncover astonishing evidence of new human species living 2,500,000 years ago
Evolution is a funny ol' thing, and while we know the human race evolved from apes, it didn't quite play out like the Planet of the Apes movies would have you think. Modern Homo sapiens share a common ancestor with chimpanzees and gorillas, although our lineages diverged around seven million years ago.
Now, we're the last-surviving species from the Homo genus that emerged from the Australopithecus genus.
It's already pretty complicated, but with archaeologists claiming to have found fossilized evidence of a new species from the Australopithecus genus, the family tree is growing. As we continue to knit together the mysteries of our past, it's said that the discovery of 13 hominin teeth buried between layers of volcanic ash in Ethiopia could be the next piece of the puzzle.
Earlier discoveries suggested that before three million years ago, several early hominins of the Australopithecus genus coexisted in this region. This included the Australopithecus afarensis species, which the infamous Lucy fossil (discovered in 1974) belonged to.
Advert
The latest findings from the Ledi-Geraru Research Project was led by scientists at Arizona State University and published in Nature as a paper called "New discoveries of Australopithecus and Homo from Ledi-Geraru, Ethiopia".
At the site, the team has supposedly found the oldest member of the Homo genus and the earliest Oldowan stone tools that were used on the planet.
The Ledi-Geraru Australopithecus teeth are thought to have come from a new species instead of belonging to Lucy's Australopithecus afarensis. Currently, there's no evidence of Lucy's species existing past 2.95 million years ago.
Explaining the find, ASU paleoecologist Kaye Reed suggested that some of the 13 teeth belong to one of the earliest Homo genus species, with others coming from this new hominin that remains currently unnamed.
As well as hypothesizing that the two could've lived in harmony or perhaps one was marginalized by the other, Reed continued: "This new research shows that the image many of us have in our minds of an ape to a Neanderthal to a modern human is not correct — evolution doesn’t work like that.
"Here we have two hominin species that are together. And human evolution is not linear, it's a bushy tree, there are life forms that go extinct."
The Ledi-Geraru field site had made the news before, with a team led by Reed discovering the jaw of the earliest Homo specimen back in 2013. That was dated 2.8 million years old, but back with another fascinating find, Ledi-Geraru Australopithecus could be another one for the history books.
Either way, the world was very different 2.6 million years ago, with the current faulted badlands once being home to rivers migrating across lush vegetation.
Reed's team will continue the hunt for more fossils, while also looking at tooth enamel to try and figure out what these species were eating.
Sadly, it doesn't look good for the new Australopithecus, as Reed concluded: "More fossils will help us tell the story of what happened to our ancestors a long time ago — but because we're the survivors we know that it happened to us."