On May 28th 2015, anthropologists on a dig in Ethiopia announced that they had discovered the fossilized remains of a previously unknown species of early humans. The remains have been dated to 3.3 million years old, which is older than Lucy, the Australopithecus Afarensis skeleton that was discovered in the same Afar region in 1974. Lucy is believed to have lived 3.2 million years ago.
The new species of hominid is being called Australopithecus Deyiremeda and is now being considered to be the earliest of modern human ancestors. The species' name is derived from the Afar language and translates as "close," and "relative." The find suggests that several different hominid species roamed Eastern Africa more than 3 million years ago, including Kenyanthropus Platyops which lived in what is now Kenya.
The current fossil evidence consists of an upper and lower jawbone. The remains were actually found in March of 2011. The bones were found so close to Hadar in the Afar region were Lucy was found, that the researchers guessed that the bones must have belonged to her species. But, upon closer inspection, they discovered that the lower jaw was beefier and the teeth were smaller than those of the Australopithecus Afarensis and Kenyanthropus Platyops species.
Yohannes Haile Selassie, of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, and whose team made the discovery, said, "The question that is going to come up is which taxa gave rise to our genus." To make a stronger case for Australopithecus Deyiremeda, Selassie's team hope to link the jawbones to foot fossils of as as yet unidentified species that was also found during their Afar dig. Selassie said, "Then we will be in a better position to say that this is a new species."
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