NEWS RELEASE

Thursday, July 12, 2001

Oldest ancestors lived in Ethiopia

BY MARK HENDERSON, SCIENCE CORRESPONDENT , THE TIMES

A CLUSTER of bones and teeth discovered in Ethiopia are the remains of the earliest known member of mankind’s family tree, an international team of scientists announced yesterday.

The fossils, of a creature named Ardipithecus ramidus kaddaba, have been dated to between 5.2 and 5.8 million years ago, giving the species a good claim to the title of the first human ancestor or relative.

Researchers who found, identified and dated the proto-humans, which lived in thick forests in a volcanic rift valley, said they came from one of the original species of hominids — the branch of the primate family tree that leads to modern humans after the split from chimpanzees.

Until now, the earliest confirmed hominid has been Ardipithecus ramidus ramidus, a later cousin of the new species, which lived about 4.4 million years ago. Other scientists have recently claimed Orrorin tugenensis, or Millennium Man, which is 6 million years old, as the first in the line, but doubts remain as to whether it is really part of the human family, or is another type of ape. The findings, published today in the journal Nature, have emerged from a study of a jawbone with teeth, several hand and foot bones, and fragments of arm and collar bones, discovered along the western margin of the Afar Rift in Ethiopia, 140 miles north east of Addis Ababa.

Yohannes Haile-Selassie of the University of California at Berkeley, who found the first bone in 1997 and led the subsequent research, said that though his fossils are younger than Millennium Man, which was discovered last year by an Anglo-French team, they are more likely to come from a hominid. “I have no doubt that their species is older, by at least 200,000 years, but the argument is about whether Orrorin (Millennium Man) is actually a hominid,” he said. “In Orrorin, we see more ape-like characteristics, whereas our new subspecies is clearly a hominid.”

Millennium Man could be a common ancestor of man and chimpanzees, the earliest chimpanzee, or another ape which later became extinct, Dr Haile-Selassie said.

What is certain is that both sets of fossils reveal important new clues about the evolutionary split between hominids and chimpanzees, and new information about the habitat of man’s earliest ancestors.