Fossils of jaw and teeth found from the Afar region of Ethiopia on Wednesday, May 27, 2015 have paved light to a potential new member in the human race family tree.
Yohannes Haile-Selassie, a paleoanthropologist in Cleveland Museum of Natural History along with his team members have led the study which was published in Journal nature.
As per earlier speculations, this race might have lived 3 – 3.5 million years ago, and they might have shared the planet with famous human ancestor ‘Lucy’. The new species is being named, Australopithecus deyiremeda.
The most ancient known member of humankind ,Homo’ genus is supposed to have roamed in the earth 2.8 million years ago. With this new finding, scientists are quite confident to unleash more details about the two early human ancestor species which have lived at the same place and time three million years ago.
Australopithecus deyiremeda was unearthed just 50 kilometers away from the place where excavators found the Lucy’s skeleton in 1974.
As per Yohannes, the position of cheek bone and small teeth made this fossil look more similar to us than the previously unearthed Lucy.
The dental difference clearly indicates that Lucy and Australopithecus deyiremeda had entirely different diet, and they have not competed each other for existence.
The new species have a more robust lower jaw, and the thickness of enamel is more in molars. With this new finding, the story of human evolution is getting more and more complex, and if more branches are being added to the phylogenetic tree, it will surely break all the conservative conceptions which prevail in this area.