A new portrait for the family tree
The human family album has gained a new portrait, after scientists discovered a skull of our earliest ancestor and reconstructed its face.
Australopithecus anamensis (meaning southern ape of the lake) is the oldest known species of the human evolutionary tree after it branched away from ape-like creatures around 4.2 million years ago.
Until recently paleoanthropologists had only found fragments of jaw, limb bones and teeth, making it difficult to know what it looked like.
However, in 2016, a “remarkably complete” fossil skull was found in the sediment of an ancient lake in the Afar region of Ethiopia.
Now, after years of comparison with other fossils, scientists have confirmed that it belonged to Australopithecus anamensis, and have recreated the face of the species for the first time.
Dr Stephanie Melillo, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, said: “It is good to finally be able to put a face to the name.”
The fossil skull — dubbed MRD — dates from 3.8 million years ago. It was dated using minerals in layers of volcanic rocks nearby and found to have canine teeth much smaller than its ape-like predecessors, and a broader flatter face common to later australopithecines.
It was found that the species overlapped with Australopithecus afarensis by about 100,000 years, contradicting the long-held belief that anamensis evolved into afarensis, thus rewriting the human lineage.
“We used to think that A. anamensis gradually turned into A. afarensis over time,” said Melillo. “We still think these two species had an ancestordescendent relationship, but this discovery suggests the two species were actually living together . . . for quite some time.”
Commenting in the journal Nature, where the research was published, Dr Fred Spoor, of London’s Natural History Museum, said: “MRD is a great addition to the fossil record of human evolution. Its discovery will substantially affect our thinking on the origin of the genus Australopithecus specifically, and on the evolutionary family tree of early hominins more broadly.”