A student found a 2.8 million year old human jawbone in Ethiopia. The jawbone fragment is the oldest known fossil from an evolutionary tree branch that soon led to modern humans. Check out the photos in the gallery and read more on the story after the jump!
The new found jawbone now pushes back the fossil record by at least 400,000 years for our branch Homo. A graduate student from Arizona State University found the human jawbone in Ethiopia in 2013. The jawbone dates back 400,000 years before the next oldest fossil human remains. ASU’s Institute of Human Origin, shows that the jawbone is now the earliest evidence of the human genus. Chalachew Seyoum, from Ethiopia, a grad student, says “Honestly, it was an exciting moment… I had a good experience in field surveying and knew where potential sediments are. I climbed up a little plateau and found this specimen right on the edge of the hill.”
The student found the jawbone in the Ledi-Geraru area of the Afar region. This was near the site of where Lucy’s skeleton was found, the famous 3.2 million-year-old fossil of the species Australopithecus afarensis found in 1974. Experts believe that the Homo genus could have evolved a million years earlier than previously thought. The new fossil would provide researchers with evidence to bridge the gap between fossils and better map out the human genus evolution.
William H. Kimbel, director of Arizona State University’s Institute of Human Origins says, “The importance of the specimen is that it adds a data point to a period of time in our ancestry in which we have very little information…This is a little piece of the puzzle that opens the door to new types of questions and field investigations that we can go after to try to find additional evidence to fill in this poorly known time period.”
Check out the photos of the 2.8 million year old human jawbone in the gallery!
