A jawbone that may be transitional between Australopithecus and the earliest Homo has turned up in Ethopia. BBC takes up the story:

Scientists have unearthed the jawbone of what they claim is one of the very first humans.

The 2.8 million-year-old specimen is 400,000 years older than researchers thought that our kind first emerged.

The discovery in Ethiopia suggests climate change spurred the transition from tree dweller to upright walker.

The head of the research team told BBC News that the find gives the first insight into “the most important transitions in human evolution”.

Prof Brian Villmoare of the University of Nevada in Las Vegas said the discovery makes a clear link between an iconic 3.2 million-year-old hominin (human-like primate) discovered in the same area in 1974, called “Lucy”.

Could Lucy’s kind – which belonged to the species Australopithecus afarensis – have evolved into the very first primitive humans?

“That’s what we are arguing,” said Prof Villmoare.

….Prof Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London described the discovery as a “big story”.

He says the new species clearly does show the earliest step toward human characteristics, but suggests that half a jawbone is not enough to tell just how human it was and does not provide enough evidence to suggest that it was this line that led to us.

Full report: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31718336

> Could Lucy’s kind – which belonged to the species Australopithecus afarensis – have evolved into the very first primitive humans?

Yes.

2.8 million years. wow!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTOla3TyfqQ&t=75

mollwollfumble said:

> Could Lucy’s kind – which belonged to the species Australopithecus afarensis – have evolved into the very first primitive humans?

Yes.

Yes, but so could the various other species of gracile australopiths. Note that the Institute of Human origins is plumping for afarensis because their founder, Donald Johanson, was the discoverer of Lucy (and a notorious egomaniac).

Bubblecar said:

mollwollfumble said:

> Could Lucy’s kind – which belonged to the species Australopithecus afarensis – have evolved into the very first primitive humans?

Yes.

Yes, but so could the various other species of gracile australopiths. Note that the Institute of Human origins is plumping for afarensis because their founder, Donald Johanson, was the discoverer of Lucy (and a notorious egomaniac).

A search on “Donald Johanson” egomaniac gets more than 14,000 hits, including this one from 1989:
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1989-12-03/features/8903140714_1_richard-leakey-paleoanthropologist-donald-johanson

In order to put together a reliable path for the origin of Homo sapiens it is necessary to consider all the fossil evidence together, placed in its correct time frame. It is not sufficient to compare a small fraction of the total excavated. It is not satisfactory to discuss “primitive” vs “gracile” features, palaeontologists can argue forever depending on which features they consider “primitive”. It is also not satisfactory to allocate a fossil to a “species” and then compare the merits of one “species” vs another when it comes to the origin of Homo sapiens. In small populations over timescales like this, a million years or so, species are mutable and merge into one another in a non-linear manner. The mutability occurs both at the time of the original geographic separation and afterwards when they come back onto contact by interbreeding. The situation is complicated by the interpersonal variation between individuals of the same “species” being much more varied in the past than it is at present, because Homo sapiens went through an evolutionary bottleneck just 100,000 or so years ago.

However, that said, there is a clear line of ancestry for Homo sapiens from Proconsul and Dryopithecus (23 million years ago) to the present day. It only gets confused over a relatively short length of that timespan.

The Rev Dodgson said:

A search on “Donald Johanson” egomaniac gets more than 14,000 hits, including this one from 1989:
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1989-12-03/features/8903140714_1_richard-leakey-paleoanthropologist-donald-johanson

One of my anthropology books, Java Man by Curtis, Swisher & Lewin, includes many disgruntled rants about Johanson (his name in the index includes subheadings like: “jealousy of”, “objections to behaviour of”, “personal finances of”, “personality of” etc).