NEW YORK: The recent analysis of a single human jaw with five teeth on an Ethiopian hilltop could redefine ancient history as we know it.
“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,” reports William H. Kimbel, the director of Arizona State University’s Institute of Human Origins. “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.”
This period of time is between two million and three million years ago. That is a lot of time for us to know so little, and that is what makes this discovery so significant: because it suggests that the evolution of the Homo genus may have occurred earlier than we once thought.
Kimbel goes on to say, “This narrows the time period in which we can now focus our search for the emergence of the human lineage,” about the AL 666-1 jaw, which he actually found in 1994. “It’s very much a transitional form, as would be expected at that age. The chin looks backwards in time. But the shape of the teeth looks forward.”
He adds, “One of paleoanthropology’s main research goals has been to fiddle the temporal and evolutionary gap between these early and later phenomena. It’s been difficult.”
Perhaps, though, this particular find and new information will provide many more answers to this obscure period in our history as humans.
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