THE MOST

IMPORTANT
DISCOVERY OF
ALL TIME
Here starts
the lesson!
 Shaking up the human family tree
he decade has seen numerous advances in understanding
our complex origin story, including new dates on known
fossils, spectacularly complete fossil skulls, and the addition
of multiple new branches. In 2010, National Geographic
explorer-at-large Lee Berger unveiled a distant ancestor
named Australopithecus sediba. Five years later, he
announced that South Africa’s Cradle of Humankind cave
system contained fossils of a new species: Homo naledi, a
hominin whose “mosaic” anatomy resembles that of both
modern humans and far more ancient cousins. A follow-up
study also showed that H. naledi is surprisingly young,
living at least between 236,000 and 335,000 years ago.
Other remarkable discoveries piled up in Asia.
In 2010, a team announced that DNA
pulled from an ancient Siberian pinky
bone was unlike any modern human’s, the
first evidence of a shadowy lineage now
called the Denisovans. In 2018, a site in
China yielded 2.1-million-year-old stone
tools, confirming that toolmakers spread
into Asia hundreds of thousands of years Describe here the
earlier than once thought. In 2019,
researchers in the Philippines
topic of the section
announced fossils of Homo luzonensis, a
new type of hominin similar to Homo
floresiensis, the “hobbit” of Flores. And
newfound stone tools on Sulawesi predate
modern humans’ arrival, which suggests
the presence of a third, unidentified island
hominin in Southeast Asia.
 Another discovery that was
made about the human
family tree
● The discovery in Kenya of a 3.5-million-year-old skull puts the origin of
humankind into question, puzzling scientists.
● Paleontologists in Africa have found a 3.5-million-year-old skull from
what they say is an entirely new branch of the early human family tree, a
discovery that threatens to overturn the prevailing view that a single line
of descent stretched through the early stages of human ancestry.
● The discoverers and other scientists of human evolution say they are not
necessarily surprised by the findings, but certainly confused.
● Now it seems the fossil species Australopithecus afarensis, which lived
from about 4-million to 3-million years ago and is best known from the
celebrated Lucy skeleton, was not alone on the African plain. Lucy may
not even be a direct human ancestor, after all.
● Indeed, the family tree, once drawn with a trunk straight and true, is
beginning to look more like a bush, with a tangle of branches of uncertain
relationship leading off in many directions.
● The skull discovery was made in 1999 by a research team led by Dr.
Meave G. Leakey excavating on the western side of Lake Turkana in
northern Kenya. Only after careful analysis did the scientists conclude
that the nearly complete skull and partial jaw represented a completely
different genus and species. The flattened face and small molar teeth
were strikingly different from those of the contemporary afarensis, or
Lucy, species.
In a report in today's issue of the journal Nature, Leakey formally named the
new member of the hominid family Kenyanthropus platyops, flat-faced man of
Kenya. The dates for the fossils, ranging from 3.2-million to 3.5-million years
old, were derived from volcanic ash buried at the site. The gender of the
individual has not been determined.
"Kenyanthropus shows persuasively that at least two lineages existed as far
back as 3.5-million years," Leakey said in a statement issued by the National
Museums of Kenya in Nairobi, where she is the principal paleoanthropologist.
"The early stages of human evolution are more complex than we previously
thought."
Leakey said the diversity in fossil hominids should not be surprising because
the ancestry of mammals is usually marked by many different branches.
When the early hominids split off from ancestors of the ape and started walking
on two legs, they would have been capable of moving into new habitats and
developing into new species.
Until recently, scientists have recognized only three groups of hominids. The
genus Homo evolved more than 2-million years ago and led to modern humans.
Paranthropus was a robust contemporary of Homo that became extinct about 1-
million years ago. Both of these groups were presumed to have descended
from an early species of the other hominid genus, Australopithecus.
Ever since its discovery in 1974 in Ethiopia by Dr. Donald Johanson, the
australopithecine known as Lucy, or afarensis, has been generally regarded as
the most likely common ancestor of all subsequent hominids, including humans.