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The skull of a two-million-year-old distant human cousin was discovered by an Australian research team in South Africa.
The research team found the skull fragments in 2018 at the Drimolen archaeological site north of Johannesburg.
The skull was found a few meters from the location of a child of a similar age. The skull of Homo erectus was found in 2015.
Paranthropus robustus lived around the same time as Homo erectus, but the species had smaller brains and significantly larger teeth.
It was also found that while both species lived at the same time, Paranthropus robustus became extinct earlier.
Dr Angeline Leece told the BBC the discovery is rare and exciting as previous discoveries had only been “a single tooth here and there”.
‘These two very different species represent divergent evolutionary experiments,’ said Dr. Leece.
“While we were the lineage that ultimately won, two million years ago the fossil record suggests that Paranthropus robustus was much more common than Homo erectus on the landscape.”
The results suggest that Paranthropus robustus had a diet consisting mainly of hard plants and bark and this is the reason for the larger teeth.
“Over time, Paranthropus robustus likely evolved to generate and resist higher forces produced when biting and chewing food that was difficult or mechanically demanding to process with their jaws and teeth,” said Dr. Leece.
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