Fragments of a 2.6-million-year-old jaw fossil found in northeastern Ethiopia are changing the picture of early human evolution in Africa. The jaws of bipedal hominid relatives of extinct humans indicate that the species traveled far north into areas where other hominids were already present.
This ancient jaw belongs to the genus Paranthropus and was discovered more than 1,000 kilometers further north than other fossils of its kind.
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The genus Paranthropus includes three species that are distantly related to humans: P. robustus, P. boisei, and P. aethiopicus, and are collectively known as “robustos.” These species, which began walking upright about 2.7 million years ago, were unique in having huge teeth and jaws, which gave one fossil skull the nickname “Nutcracker Man.” Paranthropus fossils have been found from southern Ethiopia to southern Africa and are estimated to be between 2.8 million and 1.4 million years old.
a surprising discovery
In January 2019, paleoanthropologists discovered a lower jaw segment called MLP-3000 at the Mille Loggya site in northeastern Ethiopia’s Afar region. The jaw, dated to about 2.6 million years ago, belonged to an older specimen whose teeth and bone structure resembled those of members of the genus Paranthropus. One species, P. aethiopicus, has been found in southern Ethiopia, but the new MLP-3000 jaw was found farther north than previous fossils of the genus.
“The discovery of Paranthropus in a remote area provides important new information,” the researchers wrote, suggesting that “this genus, like australopithecines and hominins, may be able to utilize diverse habitats and regions from northern Ethiopia to South Africa.” This means that Paranthropus likely had a much more flexible diet than the nickname “Nutcracker” suggests, allowing these hominins to disperse and adapt to a wide range of environmental conditions.
The newly discovered Paranthropus fossils at Mille Loggia add a third genus to the diverse hominid that existed in the Afar region between 2.8 and 2.5 million years ago, including Australopithecus and early humans. However, it is not yet clear whether these species have encountered each other directly.
“Findings like this raise really interesting questions in terms of thinking about, revising, and developing new hypotheses about what the main differences were between the major hominin groups,” Alemseged said.
Carol Ward, a biological anthropologist at the University of Missouri who was not involved in the study, writes in an accompanying perspective that “the revelation that Paranthropus lived in Afar between 3 million and 2.4 million years ago is particularly interesting,” given the diversity of human species present.
Although all humans on Earth are now one species, Ward points out that human diversity lasted for millions of years, until our extinct cousins Neanderthals and Denisovans disappeared more than 30,000 years ago.
“Researchers can no longer accept that humans evolved from a single species lineage and progressed toward modern times in isolation from other species,” she wrote.
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