mollwollfumble said:
Teleost said:
Researchers have confirmed that a new hominin ancestor lived in Ethiopia between 3.3 and 3.5 million years ago, at the same time as the ‘Lucy’ species, Australopithecus afarensis.
The discovery, which has been described today in the journal Science, sheds new light on how modern humans evolved, and shows that the process of how we came to be was more complex than previously thought.
more
See also http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-05-28/fossils-found-from-new-human-ancestor-species-scientists/6502696
It’s a lot to infer from a single jawbone. Until further evidence appears I’m prepared to believe that it was a variant of Australopithecus africanus – Lucy.
BTW, I love it when new fossil human ancestors are found.
Very interesting!
An extract from the link immediately above:
The scientists found upper and lower jaws and teeth from at least three individuals, but no other remains.
They previously found a 3.4 million-year-old partial fossil foot and “cannot rule out” that it belongs to the new species, Mr Haile-Selassie said.
Compared to Lucy, the new species had a more robust lower jaw, cheekbones further forward on the upper jaw, molars with thicker enamel and relatively small upper and lower cheek teeth, said paleoanthropologist Stephanie Melillo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology’s Department of Human Evolution in Germany.
One unanswered question is how Lucy’s species and the Australopithecus deyiremeda managed to co-exist.
“They would have been rivals if they were exploiting the same resources or had similar foraging strategies,” Mr Haile-Selassie said.
Dental differences suggest they had different diets, meaning they may not have competed for the same resources.