News - Thursday 13th April 2006

Ethiopian Fossil Find Filling in gaps in Human Evolution

Palaeoanthropologists in Ethiopia have found fossilised remains of a possible direct ancestor of humans that lived more than four million years ago. The scientists, who have been working in the Middle Awash Valley of the Afar Region, some 230km northeast of Addis Ababa, announced the discovery of what they believe to be the earliest species of the genus known as Australopethicus anamensis on Wednesday 12^th April in the science journal Nature. They claim the discovery will help define the origin of the ape-man genus and bridge a big gap in the understanding of a crucial phase in human evolution. 

"Dating to just over four million years ago, the fossils represent unambiguous evidence for human evolution," Dr Berhane Asfaw, one of the 13-member team of scientists working on the research project, said.

“It is the first time that the new species has been found outside northern Kenya, where fossils of the same genus were unearthed in 1995,” he added.

The fossils include several teeth representing at least eight different individuals, a jaw fragment and a femur, determined to be 4.1 million years old. They are 300,000 years younger than the Ardipithecus ramidus found at Aramis, another site in the study area.

"The new information that we were able to produce shows, as you all know, that humans have passed through three phases of evolution - ramidus, Australopithecus afarensis and the genus homosapiens," said Dr Berhane.

Fellow team member Professor Tim White said “our own genus, Homo, is widely thought to have evolved from this group. So the relationship of Australopithecus to even earlier bipedal hominids is crucial to understanding where we all ultimately come from.”

"The fact anamensis is sandwiched between earlier and later hominids is what is really significant about this Ethiopian sequence," said Professor White. “The finds close the gap between ramidus and afarensis. Anamensis is intermediate between the two not only chronologically but also in terms of its anatomy. This find is the first time that these three species have been shown to be time-successive in a single place.”

Afarensis was first recognised in the 1970s on the basis of the now famous Lucy skeleton discovered in Hadar in Ethiopia.

The team, made up of paleontologists, geochronologists and geologists from Ethiopian and the United States have spent five years collecting the fossils around the Asa Issie location.

ENDS