'Unprecedented' skull reveals face of human ancestor
The amazing fossil offers a snapshot from the dawn of human evolution. "It's the skull we've been waiting for," one scientist says.
A chance encounter in an Ethiopian goat pen has yielded a one-of-a-kind fossil: the nearly complete skull of a human ancestor that died some 3.8 million years ago.
The new specimen—described today in the journal Nature—is the oldest skull ever found of an australopithecine, a pivotal group of early human ancestors that lived between 1.5 and four million years ago. It’s also the first skull ever found of Australopithecus anamensis, one of the earliest members of that genus.
“It takes you back about 3.8 million years to think about what our ancestors looked like at that time,” says the study’s lead author, Yohannes Haile-Selassie, a paleoanthropologist at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. “It’s really an exciting moment.”
The find could
