'Kenyanthropus platyops': - Perhaps
6,000,000 year old men found by a maverick who went behind authorities back at Olduvai Gorge will be proven to actually not be outside australopithecine lineage. But Leakey family has found a 3.5 million year old human that definitely is, and it was announced after I had written things related hereto earlier in this effort. I love how these synchronicities occur and how much there is for us to know about ourselves. "The ‘Gang' Hits Again Those famed Leakey fossil hunters add a new limb to our family tree - by Simon Robinson, Nairobi. Like other members of famous 'hominid gang', sharp-eyed fossil hunters employed by paleontology's Leakey family, Justus Erus spends three months a year scouring dry, bone-rich riverbeds around Lake Turkana, in northern Kenya. It is a scrubby, desolate landscape, where people are desparately poor and gun-toting young men are a menacing presence. But it is hallowed ground to scientists because of clues it offers to early human history. Still, even after five years, Erus, a 30-year-old Turkana tribesman, had scored nary a hit-just bits of animal bones and teeth.
Then one scorching morning during final week of gang's explorations in August 1999, at a site called Lomekwi, Erus noticed a white object, just a cm or two across, sticking out of a patch of brown mudstone. 'I thought maybe it was (the bones of) a monkey,' he says. Beckoning expedition's co-leader, Meave Leakey, wife and daughter-in-law, respectively, of Richard and Louis Leakey and renowned in her own right, he asked her opinion. By nightfall they realized that they had uncovered partial remains of a humanlike skull.
The fossil turned out to be a totally new prehuman species and last week reignited one of paleontology's greatest debates: Did we evolve in direct steps from a common apelike ancestor between 6 million and 4 million years ago? Or did human family tree sprout branches, some of which petered out? {No integration of Mungo Man, 6,000,000 year old find, Black Skull or many other possibilities!}
In past 20 years Leakeys and others have dug up overwhelming evidence showing that between 2.5 million and 1 million years ago, then lush woodlands and savannas of eastern Africa-where our family tree first took root-were habitat of rival species, most of which were evolutionary dead ends. But what about before that? Paleontologists have generally agreed that there was just one hominid line, beginning with a small, upright-walking species known as 'Australopithecus afarensis', most famously represented by 'Lucy'., a remarkably complete (about 40%) skeleton found in Ethiopia in 1974.
Now {Ha!} that view is being challenged. The new skull, described by Leakey and six colleagues, including her and Richard's daughter Louise, 29, in 'Nature' last week, pushes presence of co-existing species back another million years, to between 3.5 million and 3.2 million years ago. That's right in Lucy's time. Yet it is so different from Lucy that they assign their fossil, which they call 'Kenyanthropus platyops', or 'flat- faced man of Kenya', to a new genus, or grouping of species. 'This means we will have to rethink early past of hominid evolution,' says Meave Leakey, head of paleontology at National Museum of Kenya. {Who didn't want Dalhousie professor digging up 6,000,000 year old bones on Yale site, that he says aren't australopithecine, to upstage them.} 'It's clear picture isn't as simple as we thought.' Even Lucy's discoverer Donald Johanson, director of Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University, concurs. 'This is a reminder that there are probably a lot more species out there,' he says.
