It is no news that humans have evolved from apes over millions of years to look like the way we do today.
However, recently researchers have discovered a 3.5-million-year-old skull in Ethiopia that gives us a clear image of what our ancestors truly looked like.
Reuters
According to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History paleoanthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassie, who's the lead researcher of this study, "This is once-in-a-lifetime discovery, and there was nothing more exciting than that." She added, "We are talking about the most complete cranium of an early human ancestor ever found in the fossil record older than 3 million years". She added, "What we see in the new cranium is like a primitive face,".
Dubbed MRD, this fossil is of an ancient hominin called Australopithecus anamensis, which is believed to be the direct ancestors of the 'Lucy' species Australopithecus afarensis. This was the time when our ancestors were learning to walk on the ground using two legs. Moreover, this was also the time when they had ape-like features on their face with a big jaw, protruding shape as well as a smaller brain.
According to researchers, MRD also had a rather robust body with a long face as well as a decently developed 'sagittal crest'-- a ridge of bone over the head that is indicative of a strong jaw muscle.?
Lucy had become one of the key elements of human evolution, but no one ever focussed on its ancestors as they had very limited information to begin with. All that they were able to find was isolated jaw fragments and teeth. However, the recent discovery of MRD changes everything.
Reuters
The MRD fossil's age reveals that this species lived alongside Lucy's species, for approximately 100,000 years that contradicts the previous assumptions that the earlier species had evolved into the later one with no overlap.
"What we're seeing here is that our evolution was not entirely characterized by a linear transformation by one species to another," Haile-Selassie added.