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Australian researchers say the discovery of a two-million-year-old skull in South Africa sheds more light on human evolution.
The skull was a male Paranthropus robustus, a “cousin kind” of Standing man – a species thought to be direct ancestors of modern humans.
The two species lived around the same time, but Paranthropus robustus died first.
The research team described the discovery as exciting.
“Most of the fossil record is just a single tooth here and there, so having something like this is very rare, very lucky,” Dr Angeline Leece told the BBC.
Researchers from Melbourne’s La Trobe University found the skull fragments in 2018 at the Drimolen archaeological site north of Johannesburg.
It was discovered a few meters from a place where a similar one was aging Standing man a child’s skull was discovered in 2015.
Archaeologists then spent the last few years reconstructing and analyzing the fossil. Their findings were published Tuesday in the journal Nature, Ecology and Evolution.
Co-researcher Jesse Martin told the BBC that manipulating the fossil pieces was like working with “wet cardboard,” adding that he had used plastic straws to vacuum up the last traces of dirt.
“Competing species”
Three species of hominids (human-like creatures) are thought to have lived in South Africa simultaneously in competition with each other.
As such, the discovery of the skull presented a rare example of “microevolution” within the human lineage, Martin said.
Paranthropus robustus it had large teeth and small brains, other than Standing man who had big brains and small teeth. It is believed that the diet of the former involved the consumption of mainly resistant plants, such as tubers and bark.
“Through time, Paranthropus robustus it likely evolved to generate and resist higher forces produced during biting and chewing food that was difficult or mechanically demanding to process with their jaws and teeth, “said Dr Leece.
Scientists said it’s possible that a wetter environment caused by climate change may have reduced the food available to them.
Meanwhile Standing man, with their smaller teeth, they were more likely to eat both plants and meat.
“These two very different species … represent divergent evolutionary experiments,” said Dr. Leece.
“While we were the lineage that ultimately won, fossil records suggest it two million years ago Paranthropus robustus it was much more common than Homo erectus on the landscape. “
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