A newly reconstructed fossil face from Ethiopia reveals surprising complexity in early human evolution.
By digitally fitting together teeth and fossilized bone fragments, researchers reconstructed a strikingly well preserved face of a human ancestor that lived 1.5 million years ago. The find represents the first complete Early Pleistocene hominin cranium from the Horn of Africa and, discovered at Gona in Ethiopia, suggests that some of the earliest humans to leave Africa retained unexpectedly archaic facial features.
A fossil discovered at Gona in Ethiopia and dated to about 1.5 million years ago is offering new insight into the earliest human relatives to leave Africa.
An international research team led by Dr. Karen Baab, a paleoanthropologist at the College of Graduate Studies, created a digital reconstruction of the face of early Homo erectus. The fossil, known as DAN5 and dated to between 1.6 and 1.5 million years old, was recovered from the Afar region of Ethiopia. Its unexpectedly archaic facial structure is providing new perspectives on the species that later spread throughout Africa and into Eurasia. The research is being published in Nature Communications.
According to Dr. Baab, “We already knew that the DAN5 fossil had a small brain, but this new reconstruction shows that the face is also more primitive than classic African Homo erectus of the same antiquity. One explanation is that the Gona population retained the anatomy of the population that originally migrated out of Africa approximately 300,000 years earlier.”
