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This jawbone, shown steps from the place where it was spotted by Arizona State University
grad student Chalachew Seyoum, puts the first members of the human genus Homo
in the Afar region of Ethiopia half a million years earlier than previously thought.
Discovery pushes back the origin of our genus, Homo, by half a million years.
In a rare congruence of new evidence, two fossil jaws cast a fused beam of light on one of the darkest mysteries in human evolution: the origin of our genus Homo. The two lower jaws—one a reconstruction of a pivotal specimen found half a century ago, the other freshly plucked from the badlands of Ethiopia—point to East Africa as the birthplace of our evolutionary lineage.
The new Ethiopian fossil, announced online by the journal Science, pushes the arrival of Homo on the East African landscape back almost half a million years, to 2.8 million years ago. The date is tantalizingly close to the last known appearance, around three million years ago, of Australopithecus afarensis, an upright-walking, small-brained species best known from the skeleton called Lucy, believed by many scientists to be the direct ancestor of our genus. The new jaw, known as LD 350-1, was found in January 2013 just a dozen miles from where Lucy was found in 1974.
"This is exciting stuff," says paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson, who discovered Lucy.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...olduvai-gorge/
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