More than 25 years after scientists described the earliest human fossil belonging to the Australopithex anaminesis, researchers working in Ethiopia have found a complete skull of this individual who has long been absent from sub-human groups, which includes Homo Sibian and other extinct human relatives.
This 3.8-million-year-old wet fossil reveals an earlier observation of A. anamensis, a previously known variety of jaw shape, teeth, and few bones under the head. These results confirm that we should review the human family tree.
A. anamensis is unequivocally the oldest hominin, due to its 4.2 million years old fossils, and for years the direct ancestor of Australopithecus afarensis was widely regarded as the direct ancestor of our own species, Homo.
Looking at the data and the sequence of time periods, anthropologists believe that A. anamensis gave way to the emergence of A. afarensis through anagenesis, in which one species turns into another.
Yohannes Haile-Selassie from the Cleveland Museum of Natural History obtained the fossil from the Afar region in northeastern Ethiopia, and the properties of the fossil and jaw teeth are associated with the fossil of A. anamensis previously found.
Researchers explain their findings that due to the time period in which both types were found, an overlap of at least 100,000 years must have occurred between them. Especially since they were discovered in the same region of Ethiopia; this overlap may indicate that A. anamensis did not necessarily have transformed into A. afarensis via a genetic mutation, and instead, A. afarensis may be a section derived from its predecessor, which continued By being alongside the species that came from it.
This type of branching is called cladogenesis, and it is an evolutionary division of parents that gives way to the existence of new species, and occurs as a result of the isolation of species' individuals from each other, dictating different evolutionary trends.
These results are related to the time periods for these fossils, and the door remains open to new conclusions as more fossils are discovered for comparison.
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