Elusive cranium of early hominin found

Spoor, Fred

doi:10.1038/d41586-019-02520-9

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28 August 2019

Elusive cranium of early hominin found

A 3.8-million-year-old hominin fossil reveals what the cranium of the oldest known Australopithecus species looked like, casting doubt on assumptions about how these ancient relatives of humans evolved.

Fred Spoor ⁰

Fred Spoor
1. Fred Spoor is at the Centre for Human Evolution Research, Natural History Museum, London SW7 5BD, UK, in the Department of Human Evolution, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany, and in the Department of Anthropology, University College London, UK.
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Human evolution often captures the imagination, not least because some of our extinct hominin relatives are personified by well-preserved fossils with catchy nicknames. For example, a partial skeleton of Australopithecus afarensis is named Lucy, and an Australopithecus africanus cranium (the skull without its lower jaw) is called Mrs Ples. However, the oldest known species that is unambiguously part of the human evolutionary tree¹, Australopithecus anamensis, has mainly languished away from the limelight because of its small and not particularly glamorous fossil record. Until now, A. anamensis was known only from partial upper and lower jaw bones, isolated teeth, a small part of the braincase and a few limb bones. These specimens were found in Kenya and Ethiopia and are between 4.2 million and 3.9 million years old².

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Nature 573, 200-202 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-02520-9

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