Teeth from a new human ancestor rewrite evolution

Thirteen teeth belonging to some of the oldest members of the Homo genus and a new species of australopithecus, never described before, have been discovered in Ethiopia. The presence of both species in the same place , between 2.6 and 2.8 million years ago , demonstrates that human evolution was less linear and more branched than previously assumed, as evidenced by a study published in the journal Nature by researchers from the Ledi-Geraru Research Project led by Arizona State University. "We used to think of human evolution as a steady march from an ape-like ancestor to modern Homo sapiens. Instead , humans have branched out multiple times into different niches ," observes anthropologist Brian Villmoare, who led the study. " Nature experimented with different ways of being a human as the climate became drier in East Africa and the more ape-like antecedents became extinct." A curious catalog of these evolutionary experiments comes from the Ledi-Geraru site in eastern Ethiopia , the same site where the jaw of the oldest Homo specimen ever discovered, dating back 2.8 million years, was discovered. "The new findings of Homo teeth in sediments dating back 2.6-2.8 million years, reported in this article, confirm the antiquity of our evolutionary lineage ," the anthropologist emphasizes. Furthermore, the finds have allowed us to identify a new species of the Australopithecus genus, distinct from the well-known Australopithecus afarensis (the famous 'Lucy'), whose last appearance dates back approximately 2.95 million years ago and was discovered in nearby Hadar. Now "we know what the teeth and jaw of early Homo looked like, but that's all," Villmoare specifies. "This highlights the crucial importance of finding additional fossils to understand the differences between Australopithecus and Homo and, potentially, how they were able to overlap in the fossil record at the same site."