African origins

New Crisis, The, May/Jun 2001 by Gilbert, Cam

The discovery of a new genus of early humans has once again traced evolution back to Africa. This latest find appears to root man's earliest origins in Kenya rather than in Ethiopia.

Until now, scientists generally regarded "Lucy," the fossilized skeletal remains of the Australopithecus afarensis species, discovered in Ethiopia in 1974, to be present-day Homo sapiens' single common ancestor. Lucy was once the only link known to exist from the period between 3 to 4 million years ago.

But a team led by Meave Leakey, head anthropologist at the National Museums of Kenya, that also included her daughter, researcher Louise Leakey, has discovered a 3.5 million-year-old skull along the Lomekwi River in northern Kenya. The find suggests for the first time that a species other than Lucy may be modern humans' earliest ancestor.

The Leakeys have assigned the fossil remains to a new genus, Kenyanthropus playops, which means "Kenyan flat face." In addition to the skull, jaw and teeth fossils also were found. The new finds were made in 1998 and 1999, and after intensive research, the team recently published its findings in the journal Nature.

"The discovery finally recognizes the diversity among hominins. No less important is that [Leakey's team] took this and created a new genus and species," says Ian Tatersall, an evolutionary biologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. "It gives us intellectual breathing space. For too long we've been forced into a linear pattern. Diversity is a pattern emerging steadily."

According to the findings, the physical differences between Lucy and the newly discovered Kenyanthropus, which in addition to a flat face has particularly small molars, indicate that the two had very different diets and could have coexisted without competing for food resources.