New Skull Discovery Confirms Multiple Lines of Hominids Living Side by Side

Kenya may be the country where science may confirm more than one line of hominids lived more or less side by side 2 million yrs ago.

Although a few specialists in human origins questioned whether the still sparse evidence was sufficient to back the new conclusions, Ian Tattersall of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, who was not involved in the new discovery, concluded, “This new material certainly substantiates the idea, long gathering ground, that multiple lineages of early Homo are present in the record at Koobi Fora.”

Dr. Tattersall continued, “And it supports the view that the early history of Homo involved vigorous experimentation with the biological and behavioral potential of the new genus, instead of a slow process of refinement in a central lineage.”

Bernard Wood of George Washington University, who has studied the early Homo fossil record, wrote in a companion article in Nature, “In a nutshell, the anatomy of the specimens supports the hypothesis of multiple early Homo species.”

So this wrinkle in the African genesis means paleontology has multiple tasks before it. The picture of evolution during this period remains dauntingly complex. The new find is being argued about whether it is

the species H. habilis, first discovered in 1964, or a separate and controversial parallel species known as H. rudolfensis, to which 1470 has often been tentatively assigned. H. erectus emerged around the same time, joining the other two species in Africa.

Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum of London, who had no part in the research, agreed that it looked as if the new discoveries “confirm the distinctiveness of 1470” and “therefore confirm the existence of a distinctive kind of early human around 1.8 to 2.0 million years ago.” But he noted that “there remain many uncertainties” about the 1470 fossil “and whether it might still be just a large specimen of Homo habilis.”

Another problem, Dr. Stringer said, is that in the last three decades, as the number of fossils attributed to habilis has grown, it has become unclear how to define what is and is not a member of that Homo species. Determining if the new fossils belong to rudolfensis or habilis, he said, “would depend on ongoing comparisons with the original fossil assemblage” at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, where the first and many other habilis and contemporary specimens have been excavated.

And the digging continues, in Olduvai and Turkana and elsewhere & who knows what might turn up?

“So where do we go from here?” Dr. Wood asked in his commentary. “More work needs to be done using the faces and lower jaws of modern humans and great apes to check how different the shapes and the palate can be among individuals in living species.”

All in all, the state of hominin affairs that paleoanthropologists are left with is neatly summed up in the title of Dr. Wood’s article, “Facing Up to Complexity.” He concluded with the prediction that “by 2064, 100 years after Leakey and colleagues’ description of H. habilis, researchers will view our current hypotheses about this phase of human evolution as remarkably simplistic.”

Stay tuned.