'First Human' Possibly Found in Ethiopia, Sheds New Light on Our Ancestors
The first humans may have evolved some 400,000 years earlier than previously thought after a fragment of jaw bone dating back 2.8 million years was found in Ethiopia, according to a new report.
A local Ethiopian student made the discovery in the Afar region in northern Ethiopia and the partial lower jaw is the oldest known fossil evidence of the genus Homo, to which modern day humans belong, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Science.
"The moment I found it, I realized that it was important, as this is the time period represented by few (human) fossils in Eastern Africa," Chalachew Seyoum told the BBC.
The fossil is dated very close to the time that the human, or "Homo" genus, or group, split away from more ape-like ancestors like Australopithecus afarensis, best known for the fossil skeleton Lucy discovered in 1974.
The fossil is from the left lower jaw of an adult and includes five teeth.
"It's the first fossil we have on the branch that leads toward us," Brian Villmoare, an anthropologist at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas who's the principal author of one of the studies in Science, told NBC News on Thursday during a teleconference.
The team behind the Nature paper, led by Fred Spoor of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, used CT scanning and 3-D imaging software to create a virtual reconstruction of the lower jaw and braincase.
"In spite of lot of searching, fossils on the Homo lineage older than 2 million years ago are very rare," Brian Villmoare, an anthropologist at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas and lead author of the article said in a statement. "To have a glimpse of the very earliest phase of our lineage's evolution is particularly exciting."
