{"id":3923512,"date":"2026-01-11T09:00:30","date_gmt":"2026-01-11T14:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/meet-australopithecus-anamensis-one-of-humankinds-oldest-ancestors\/"},"modified":"2026-01-11T09:00:30","modified_gmt":"2026-01-11T14:00:30","slug":"meet-australopithecus-anamensis-one-of-humankinds-oldest-ancestors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/meet-australopithecus-anamensis-one-of-humankinds-oldest-ancestors\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet Australopithecus anamensis, one of humankind\u2019s oldest ancestors"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

YouTube Video Here: https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/ru8ifph_q9o?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1<\/a><\/p>\n

When \u201cLucy\u201d the now-famous<\/a> Australopithecine was discovered in Ethiopia in 1974 by paleoanthropologists, researcher\u2019s minds were full of questions, but the biggest question of all was: what did Lucy\u2019s ancestors look like? That question has now been answered, at least in part, thanks to the discovery of a nearly complete skull of Australopithecus anamensis.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Skull
The skull of Lucy\u2019s ancestor, Australopithecus anamensis. Photo by Dale Omori, courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History\u00a0<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The skull, with its protruding jaw and large canine teeth, dates back some 3.8 million years, meaning its very likely that A. anamensis<\/em> overlapped with Lucy\u2019s species, Australopithecus<\/a> afarensis\u00a0<\/em>for at least 100,000 years, according to LiveScience.<\/a><\/em> A few fragmentary fossils had been found previously, but they didn\u2019t provide researchers with enough evidence to go on. Until this discovery.<\/span><\/p>\n

A. anamensis looks quite similar to Lucy but there are a few noticeable differences.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cWhat we\u2019ve known about Australopithecus anamensis so far was limited to isolated jaw fragments and teeth,\u201d study co-author Yohannes Haile-Selassie, a paleoanthropologist with the Cleveland Museum of Natural History told journalists at a press conference announcing the discovery. \u201cWe didn\u2019t have any remains of the face or the cranium except for one small fragment near the ear region.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"Haile-Selassie
Yohannes Haile-Selassie with the A. anamensis skull. Photo courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History via LiveScience.<\/em><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Before A. anamensis\u2019 discovery,<\/em> researchers had little to work with. But that changed on February 10, 2016, when Haile-Selassie and his colleagues unearthed the cranium in two good-sized pieces in the Afar Region<\/a> of Ethiopia\u2019s Godaya Valley. The fossil was entombed by the sands of what was once an ancient river delta emptied near the shore of a lake, according to Beverly Saylor, a professor of stratigraphy and sedimentology at Case Western Reserve University. Saylor was also speaking at the press conference. She was also the leader of the team of paleobotanists, geologists and paleontologists who worked out the fossil\u2019s age and its geological context.<\/p>\n

\"Johannes
Yohannes Haile-Selassie examining the find. Photo by the Cleveland Museum of Natural History via Livescience<\/a>.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Saylor added it\u2019s likely the river moved the skull away from where the hominin (human ancestor) died. But she surmised it only traveled a short distance because the skull wasn\u2019t very abraided.<\/p>\n

She said she also thinks this individual \u201cprobably was living along the river and the shores of this lake.\u201d The shores of the lake would have been forested but the surrounding landscape was arid, with scrubby vegetation. Saylor and her team were able to accurately date minerals and volcanic tuffs in the area and determined the fossil was 3.8 million years old. Based on the size of the bones, the researchers also believe the specimen was a male.<\/p>\n

\"A
Side view of the skull. Photo by Dale Omori courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History\/Livescience<\/a><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cThis specimen fills an important gap in our knowledge of the cranial anatomy of Australopithecus<\/em> during this period,\u201d said Am\u00e9lie Beaudet, a paleoanthropologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. While Beaudet wasn\u2019t involved in the research, she said the fossil helps illustrate the changes in Australopithecus<\/em> through time, and this may also illuminate geographical connections among species. The skull, she told LiveScience,<\/em> shares features with Australopithecus africanus,<\/em> a species that lived in South Africa.<\/p>\n

\"Reconstruction
A. anamensis<\/em> in profile. Photo by Matt Crow courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History via LiveScience<\/em><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The face of A. anamensis wasn\u2019t quite as rugged as Lucy\u2019s, but it was still pretty robust, the researchers noted August 28 in the journal Nature.\u00a0<\/em>Indeed, this individual, which researchers have dubbed \u201cMRD\u201d (an abbreviation of its specification classification) does have smaller canine teeth than earlier hominids, but the teeth were still larger than those of Lucy and her kind. And MRD\u2019s protruding lower jaw is very ape-like, unlike the jaw of modern humans and other species of the genus Homo,<\/em> which appeared around 2.8 million years ago.<\/p>\n

\"A
A side-by-side comparison of the reconstructed A. anamensis and its skull. Photo by Matt Crow courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Reconstruction by John Gurche via LiveScience.<\/a><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

MRD\u2019s brain was about a quarter of the size of a modern human\u2019s, The Guardian<\/em><\/a> notes, but despite those smaller canines, that protruding jaw and prominent cheekbones (that are quite similar to Lucy\u2019s) provide evidence that MRD and his kind were able to chew tough vegetation during dry periods when food was scarce.<\/p>\n

MRD\u2019s discovery challenges the long-held notion of linear evolution, which holds that one species vanishes before it is replaced by a new one. But in the case of A. anamensis,<\/em> the timeline spans from 4.2 million to 3.8 million years ago, meaning that while MRD is Lucy\u2019s ancestor, it was still around when Lucy\u2019s kind branched off from the parent lineage. Along with that, there\u2019s geological evidence that this was a landscape of steep hills, rifts, volcanoes, and lava flows that could have created isolated populations, thus allowing them to diverge.<\/p>\n

\"A.
A. anamensis.<\/em> Photograph by Matt Crow courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History via LiveScience.<\/a><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

And all of this worked to isolate subgroups of hominins, which means interbreeding sparked changes that lead to entirely new species. Meanwhile, their parent species continued to thrive and survive elsewhere. This switches things up a bit for Haile-Selassie.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cThis is a game-changer in our understanding of human evolution during the Pliocene,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Afarensis<\/em> continues to show up in the fossil record until three million years ago, and up until now, it\u2019s been considered a likely candidate to have given rise to the Homo<\/em> lineage that we humans come from. But the discovery that several lineages existed simultaneously makes the hypothesis of linear evolution considerably less certain, the researchers say.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cHaving multiple candidate ancestral species in the right time and place makes it more challenging to determine which gave rise to Homo,\u201d said Stephanie Melillo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

So it seems that on the one hand A. anamensis<\/em> has solved one mystery while creating another one by further complicating our human<\/a> story. A story, it turns out, that has many secrets yet to be revealed.<\/p>\n

In the remarkable video below, artist John Gurche, who did the reconstructions of A. anamensis<\/em> seen here takes us on a trip through human evolution.<\/p>\n

\n

Photo by Matt Crow, courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History via LiveScience.<\/a> Facial reconstruction by John Gurche.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Go to Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\n

YouTube Video Here: https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/ru8ifph_q9o?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1<\/p>\n

When \u201cLucy\u201d the now-famous Australopithecine was discovered in Ethiopia in 1974 by paleoanthropologists, researcher\u2019s minds were full of questions, but the biggest question of all was: what did Lucy\u2019s ancestors look like? That question has now been answered, at least in part, thanks to the discovery of a nearly complete […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3923512","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ancient-code","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3923512","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3923512"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3923512\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3923512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3923512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3923512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}