Many Roots
Nonlinear ancestry of man
A nearly 2 million-year-old lower jaw discovered recently in East Africa, along with other new finds.
Newly discovered face and jaw fossils show that at least two species of the human genus Homo lived alongside each other in East Africa nearly 2 million years ago. These new finds are a good match for a roughly 2 million-year-old Homo brain case and face excavated in 1972 in the same part of East Africa, reports a team led by anthropologist Meave Leakey of the Turkana Basin Institute in Nairobi, Kenya. Long considered a puzzling exception among early Homo finds, the 1972 discovery features big bones and a flat, upright face and represents a species apart, Leakey and her colleagues conclude in the Aug. 9 Nature. Until now, researchers have found it difficult to exclude the possibility that the large-faced fossil known as KNM-ER 1470 came from a male of the same species as smaller, early Homo finds in East Africa. "After so many years of questions about the identity of the enigmatic 1470 fossil, the chances that it's from a separate species have greatly improved with our new discoveries," says anthropologist and study coauthor Fred Spoor of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Leakey and her colleagues unearthed the new fossils from 2007 to 2009 along the shore of Kenya's Lake Turkana. Previously dated volcanic ash layers at the site place the finds at between 1.78 million and 1.95 million years old.
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