Ethiopian fossils reveal new member in our family tree
WASHINGTON: Jaw and teeth fossils found on the silty clay surface of Ethiopia’s Afar region represent a previously unknown member of the humankind’s family tree that lived 3.3 to 3.5 million years ago alongside the famous human ancestor ‘Lucy’, scientists say.
The fossils shed new light on a key period in the our lineage’s evolution before the emergence of our genus Homo. They provide the first evidence that two early human ancestor species lived at the same time and place prior to 3 million years ago, they said announcing the discovery on Wednesday.
The new species, Australopithecus deyiremeda, combined ape-like and human-like traits as did Lucy’s species, Australopithecus afarensis, but was sufficiently different to warrant recognition as a separate species, they said.
Lucy’s skeleton was unearthed in 1974 about 50 km from the new fossils’ location.
The new species’ cheekbone position and generally small tooth size likely made it look more like our genus than did Lucy’s species, said Cleveland Museum of Natural History paleoanthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassie.
The scientists found upper and lower jaws and teeth from at least three individuals. They previously found a 3.4 million-year-old partial fossil foot and ‘cannot rule out’ that it belongs to the new species.
One unanswered question is how Lucy’s species and the new one managed to co-exist.
“They would have been rivals if they were exploiting the same resources or had similar foraging strategies,” Haile-Selassie said.