We love Lucy – but there’s a new ‘icon of evolution’ linking humans to our past
HE might have a few lines around the eyes – but for 3.8million years old he looks remarkably well.
For this is the face of our oldest direct ancestor, reconstructed from a rare, nearly complete skull.
The adult male cranium was discovered at the Woranso-Mille fossil site in central Ethiopia.
It is Australopithecus anamensis, an ancient human even older than ‘Lucy’ – the famous ‘mother of man’ at 3.2million years old.
Scientists – who have long debated whether other fossils come from early humans or ancestral apes – appear to agree that this is the oldest undisputed human skull discovered yet. It allows them put a ‘face to the name’ of an ancestor we had only known from bits of teeth and jaw.
Dr Yohannes Haile-Selassie, whose team discovered the skull, said: ‘It was a dream come true.’
Dr Stephanie Melillo, from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and a co-author of two papers on the find in the journal Nature, said: ‘Australopithecus anamensis was already a species that we knew Bare bones: The original skull about, but... it is good to be able to put a face to the name.’
Despite its small size, the skull is believed to have belonged to an adult living in dry shrubland. The findings suggest our oldest ancestor lived at the same time as Lucy’s species for at least 100,000 years. Previously, it was thought Australopithecus anamensis died out to be replaced by Lucy’s species.
Fred Spoor, of the Natural History of Museum, London, said the skull is ‘another icon of human evolution’.