Our Human Origins May Have Been Pushed Back 400,000 Years

This discovery seems to be blowing up all my nerdy science sites, so I thought I would share it with you and see what your thoughts were.

I, myself, find it very intriguing.

Researchers working in Ethiopia have unearthed the oldest human fossil ever, and the discovery could push back the origin of the Homo genus by half a million years.

The lower jaw fossil has been described in two simultaneous papers published in Science today (here and here), and is helping to shed some light on the mysterious origin of our human family in eastern Africa. The fossil, which was first found in 2013, has been dated to around 2.8 million years old, at least 400,000 years older than any previous Homo fossil.

"There is a big gap in the fossil record between about 2.5 million and 3 million years ago - there's virtually nothing relating to the ancestors of Homo from that time period, in spite of a lot of people looking," co-author of the study Brian Villmoare from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas told Charles Q. Choi from Live Science. "Now we have a fossil of Homo from this time, the earliest evidence of Homo yet."

Excitingly, the fossil was found extremely close to the last known remnants of Australopithecus afarensis, a hominid species that many researchers believe was the direct ancestor of the Homo genus. A. afarensis is best known from the skeleton, Lucy.

Only around 200,000 years separate the remains of Lucy and the newly discovered Homo jaw bone, known as LD 350-1, and it helps to paint a clearer picture than we've ever had before about our heritage.

www.sciencealert.com...

a reply to: oldworldbeliever

Thanks for posting this as I had seen it mentioned but not found an article on this yet. Very interesting. That timeline is interesting too as I had always thought Homo habilus was on our line but looks like it was dead branch.

cheers

I have not posted for some time, with the current weather, I find a little free time. All indicators point to one simple truth... we know very little of our past. With places like Gobekli Tepe, Easter Island, and so on, the history of the Earth's inhabitants is fragmented at best and there is much yet uncovered. If this fossil is dated even close, events on earth may have done many in and some may have carried on to where we are now. Intervention would have changed the course, and forces may have leaped the rate of progression, but here we stand, in the dark, hoping the so called leaders of this rock do not end the cycle here at this point...Thanks for the thread...

originally posted by: grumpy64
a reply to: oldworldbeliever

Thanks for posting this as I had seen it mentioned but not found an article on this yet. Very interesting. That timeline is interesting too as I had always thought Homo habilus was on our line but looks like it was dead branch.

cheers

If you have not seen it, this is the "family" tree.

The National Geographic team has created a really useful illustration below showing where the new jawbone, LD 350-1, fits in our family tree.

originally posted by: teslahowitzer
I have not posted for some time, with the current weather, I find a little free time. All indicators point to one simple truth... we know very little of our past. With places like Gobekli Tepe, Easter Island, and so on, the history of the Earth's inhabitants is fragmented at best and there is much yet uncovered. If this fossil is dated even close, events on earth may have done many in and some may have carried on to where we are now. Intervention would have changed the course, and forces may have leaped the rate of progression, but here we stand, in the dark, hoping the so called leaders of this rock do not end the cycle here at this point...Thanks for the thread...

You are welcomed!
What is most interesting is this "gap" in evidence of about 500,000 year. I would love to see something in the fossil record at the moment of the "split" and how we ended up where we are are currently.

Reference the depiction above.

Even at 50% error rate, 250K years is quite a span. We are not the first earth (inhabitant cycle) we could be much further down the lineage. The event that took down the dinosaurs could have very well eliminated a race or two. Given the time, man may answer many huge historical questions of where we came from, and where we are going...

And so it goes........an ever bigger and more complicated puzzle.......good find....

originally posted by: teslahowitzer
Even at 50% error rate, 250K years is quite a span. We are not the first earth (inhabitant cycle) we could be much further down the lineage. The event that took down the dinosaurs could have very well eliminated a race or two. Given the time, man may answer many huge historical questions of where we came from, and where we are going...

Oh, I agree.
There are many missing pieces to the real truth of our beginnings. And there are clues, although many are considered myths and stories,to what may have happened.

originally posted by: grumpy64
a reply to: oldworldbeliever

Thanks for posting this as I had seen it mentioned but not found an article on this yet. Very interesting. That timeline is interesting too as I had always thought Homo habilus was on our line but looks like it was dead branch.

cheers

Very interesting. I started devoting a section in my favorites to human/primate evolution a year or two ago. This will gladly take a place there, as well as this homo habillis link:
www.nature.com - Reconstructed Homo habilis type OH 7 suggests deep-rooted species diversity in early Homo...

....We find that this shape variability is not consistent with a single species of early Homo. Importantly, the jaw morphology of OH 7 is incompatible with fossils assigned to Homo rudolfensis8 and with the A.L. 666-1 Homo maxilla. The latter is morphologically more derived than OH 7 but 500,000 years older10, suggesting that the H. habilis lineage originated before 2.3 million years ago, thus marking deep-rooted species diversity in the genus Homo. We also reconstructed the parietal bones of OH 7 and estimated its endocranial volume. At between 729 and 824 ml it is larger than any previously published value, and emphasizes the near-complete overlap in brain size among species of early Homo....

I find it astonishing we go back millions of years.... and all life goes back billions.... I start think about other planets and I get dizzy.

I still think hominids may have evolved from some sort of Raptor dinosaurs. We differ from most other mammals by the sugar in our bodies. Strangely, birds do not have that type of sugar. We are attracted to colors like birds, our brains are wired like birds, our hair looks more like pinfeathers, and we like to hear people sing. A monkey does not care to hear other monkeys sing.

We are so much different than other species of mammals and there has been no real research into a thought train like this that I know of. I've been contemplating this possibility for a while, but this would be really hard to prove. I guess I watched Fred Flintstone too much when I was a kid

a reply to: oldworldbeliever
A fascinating find. As we start to fill in the blanks in to fossil record I think the line between the genus homo and pre-homo is getting blured. Seems more analog and gradual than well defined

originally posted by: rickymouse
I still think hominids may have evolved from some sort of Raptor dinosaurs. We differ from most other mammals by the sugar in our bodies. Strangely, birds do not have that type of sugar. We are attracted to colors like birds, our brains are wired like birds, our hair looks more like pinfeathers, and we like to hear people sing. A monkey does not care to hear other monkeys sing.

We are so much different than other species of mammals and there has been no real research into a thought train like this that I know of. I've been contemplating this possibility for a while, but this would be really hard to prove. I guess I watched Fred Flintstone too much when I was a kid

Sounds legit..

Interesting. I'm always a little unsure of the precision of the dating in cases like this, particularly when such far outlying dates are given, based on a single fragment of a lower jaw. I look forward to seeing further research.

And before anyone gets the wrong idea, just because this potential ancestor is in the same genus as us, doesn't mean it's 'human' in any way. This is about creatures that predated A.Afarensis by a good long while...


Edit: I'm pretty sure most scientists will agree that we are not descended from birds or reptiles.

originally posted by: rickymouse
I still think hominids may have evolved from some sort of Raptor dinosaurs.

We 100% definately did not evolve from dinosaurs. They're not even mammals.

a reply to: oldworldbeliever

It is a major discovery.

I just wish they hadn't called the earliest Man a 'HOMO'.

a reply to: GetHyped

But then in different places around the world different species have ended up solving problems with similar designs.

tenrecs from madagascar looking the same as hedgehogs,shrew although still in the mammal genus.

However can we outright dismiss a reptilian heritage?
After all a few snakes and lizards do give birth to live young rather than laying eggs.

David Icke certainly thinks not

originally posted by: johnb

However can we outright dismiss a reptilian heritage?

Because we're not reptiles, we're mammals.

a reply to: GetHyped

Human fetuses exhibit a few reptilian traits during the process of growing to maturity, part of a tail bone being one of them. Just saying.

a reply to: andy06shake

We are not reptiles. There not much more to say than that, really.

a reply to: andy06shake

That's because we share genetic similarities to all life on the planet. Naturally there will be a few things that we as humans do similar to reptiles. That doesn't mean we are reptiles though. Perhaps you are unfamiliar with taxonomic ranks and how we classify life on this planet?