Molar Might Alter Our Ancestral Origins

Africa or Europe? New studies of a 7.2-million-year-old tooth raises questions about where the first human came from.

About seven million years ago, humans first left Africa, according to the dominant theory about our origin, which is now challenged by an international team of paleoanthropologists. The development is due to new examinations of a 7.2-million-year-old fossilised tooth discovered in Bulgaria in 2012 and a lower jaw excavated in Greece in 1944. These are the only existing remains of Graecopithecus freybergi, which scientists have tried to classify for years. CT scans and 3D reconstructions show, how much the tooth resembles ours. While the hominids of the time had separate tooth roots, the tooth root of the Graecopithecus freybergi was partly united like in modern man. So, scientists believe that the Graecopithecus freybergi is one of the earliest relatives of man, and that might mean that man originated in Europe 200,000 years earlier than previously believed.