Thanks to the discovery of an other human ancestor ’s skull – the most complete of its kind ever unearthed – we can now gaze face - to - face with our distant past .
In February 2016 , Yohannes Haile - Selassie and an international team of anthropologists found the near - complete skull of an early hominin in the moth-eaten Godaya Valley of Woranso - Mille , Ethiopia . Reporting their finding in two papers ( hereandhere ) published in the diary Nature today , the researchers show the skull date back some 3.8 million yr and belonged to anAustralopithecus anamensis , one of the earliest knownAustralopithecusspecies that are related to modern human beings .
Part of the upheaval around the specimen is its remarkable condition . Until now , A. anamensiswas known from a sprinkle of jawbones , chipped tooth , and a few shatter branch bones . Now that research worker have a near - complete skull of this removed cousin , they can start to piece together what this distant cousin actually looked like using digital applied science .
“ This specimen is the first to give us a glance of whatAustralopithecus anamensisreallylooked like , ” Yohannes Haile - Selassie , forefront of Physical Anthropology at The Cleveland Museum of Natural History , said in a group discussion call on Tuesday .
“ [ It shows ] early human ancestors were very ' primitive ' until the genusHomoarrived , ” he added . " They still have ape - same faces and an aper - corresponding cranial morphology . "
The skull is believed to have been an adult male ( despite its modest size ) and lived in dry shrubland , but spent some time in grassland , wetland , and riverside forests .
Australopithecusis a genus of other bipedal hominin that roamed Earth as far back as 4 million years ago . Their name is a Latin and Romanist mash - up that means “ southern copycat ” , although they are known to have experience through singular spots across southern , eastern , and magnetic north - key Africa until they went nonextant some 2 million years ago .
Their extinction , however , was just the beginning of the story . TheAustralopithecusspecies played a significant part in human evolution , with the genusHomo(as in , Homo sapien ) emerging fromAustralopithecussome time after 3 million years ago .
Our sympathy of this new skull is now challenging a lot of onetime assumption of this mysterious ascendent . One of the well - love member of this genus isAustralopithecus afarensis , represented by thefamous “ Lucy ” fossil . wayward to previous research , this skull indicate thatA. anamensisandA. afarensisactually differed quite a bit in appearance .
It was also once pondered thatA. anamensisled the way forA. afarensisin a single evolving lineage . However , the geological dating of this specimen suggests the two species overlap for at least 100,000 year . Like most chapter in the story of human organic evolution , the way is not a simple analog line . alternatively , just as this skull further highlights , it ’s actually a criss - cross of paths with intersection and dead - ends .
“ This brainpan looks set to become another celebrated icon of human evolution , ” writesFred Spoor , a professor of human evolutionary figure at UCL in the UK who was not instantly call for in this cogitation , inan accompanying clause .
" Its discovery will well affect our thinking on the origin of the genusAustralopithecusspecifically , and on the evolutionary family tree of early hominins more broadly , " he add together .
