Fossils of new early human species found in Africa

(picture from BBC)

Researchers discovered fossils recently in eastern and central Africa that show formerly unknown human species living between 3.3 and 3.5 million years ago.

The latest has been unearthed in Afar, Ethiopia, according to a paper published online May 27 in the journal Nature.

It's being called Australopithecus deyiremeda, which means "close relative of all later hominins" in the Afar language.

Lead researcher Yohannes Haile-Selassie, of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, told the BBC, "This new species has very robust jaws. In addition, we see this new species has smaller teeth."

This ancestor appears to be one of four different species of hominins living at the same time, according to the BBC.

Source: www.usatoday.com...

Just after tools were discovered in Kenya, new human species found in Afar, Ethiopia, Kenya's neighbor. Time frame is close to tools that we covered in this thread, but still this does not have to mean that there is connection. It is exciting time... many new discoveries.

a reply to: SuperFrog

I was just about to post about this. There's a bit more information at Past Horizons.

Lucy, we hardly knew ye.

Humans are of course much older than the first fossil records. To get to the point of providing a body to be fossilized, humans had to evolve for possibly untold millions of years. Good find OP, and any new data in this field is interesting and should be welcomed by many fields of endeavor.

Oooh,this is getting more exciting by the day!Seven-foot warriors,three million year-old tools and previously unknown bipeds!

I was looking to see if this was posted. I seen it on CBC today and figured someone had it up already.

I think this is awesome. Anything that helps fill in our knowledge of our evolution is one step closer to understanding ourselves and our history.

I went to my schools library to read the entire article but they don't have the newest edition of Nature catalogued yet.

If is school library, you are in luck. My local library has access to database resources, but most of them have something like this:

(90 day delay due to publisher embargo period)

Here is link for publication....

www.nature.com...