Found, new species of prehistoric ape man
SCIENTISTS have discovered remains of an unknown species of early human who lived in Africa 3.5million years ago.
The discovery of jawbones and teeth in Ethiopia suggests our family tree is more complicated than we thought.
Until a few years ago, experts believed our ancestors evolved in a linear fashion, with chimpanzees developing into ‘ape men’ and then, in stages, into Homo sapiens.
It was thought there was just one kind of ‘ape man’, Australopithecus afarensis, 3.5million years ago, seen in a fossil named ‘Lucy’ that was found in Ethiopia in 1974.
But the latest fossils, found 22 miles away from the site of Lucy’s discovery, suggest there may have been several different species at the same time, in the same region.
Scientists have named the new species Australopithecus deyiremeda, and the remains are thought to belong to four individuals who would have had both ape and human-like features.
The discovery increases evidence that East Africa – particularly the Woranso-Mille area of Ethiopia – was a hotspot of evolution. It suggests a number of early human species emerged in Africa but then later died out as ‘evolutionary dead ends’.
Writing the journal Nature, lead researcher Dr Yohannes Haile-Selassie, of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in the US, said: ‘This new species… takes the ongoing debate on early hominin diversity to another level.’
The first members of our own branch of the evolutionary tree, Homo, are thought to have emerged around 3million years ago.