ABOVE: DALE OMORI, COURTESY OF THE CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY
A rare discovery of an ancient hominin skull could lead researchers to redraw the human family tree.
Archeologists found the 3.8-million-year-old skull in Ethiopia and they say it’s from the species Australopithecus anamensis, long thought to be a predecessor of Lucy—A. afarensis. A feature of the newly discovered skull, however, suggests that the two species might have lived contemporaneously for at least 100,000 years in what is now Eastern Africa, according to two papers published today (August 28) in Nature.
“I have no doubt that this specimen will become one of the iconic specimens in early human evolution,” David Strait, a paleoanthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis who was not involved in the work, tells The Washington Post. The team’s assessment that A. anamensis might not have been a predecessor of Lucy, but a contemporary is “an interesting ...
