#australopithecus anamensis

Source: https://www.mchenry.edu/origins/species/australopithecus-anamensis.html

Around 4.3 million years ago, the oldest known Australopithecus, a name from the Latin and Ancient Greek meaning 'southern ape', arose around modern day Kenya in the Turkana Basin. The oldest known Astralopithecus was given the name A anamensis, from the Turkana word 'anam', which means 'lake'.

By Guérin Nicolas (messages) - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6516216

First discovered in 1965, a portion of a humerus, or upper arm bone, was found near West Lake Turkana was originally thought to be 2.5 million years old, and that was later adjusted to 4.5-4.0 million years old based on the other animals found around the fossil. In 1994, more fragments, including a complete lower jaw, was found near Allia Bay. The jaw has a structure that resembles modern chimpanzees, but its teeth have more in common with modern humans. Twenty-one fossils were found in total, including an upper jaw, parts of the cranium, and parts of both upper and lower leg bones. The second find was also about 9.7 km away from where Ardipithecus ramidus was found, a species that lived roughly 200,000 years earlier.

By Phil H. - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31933854

During the time that A anamensis lived, the area around Allia Bay was fairly wooded with more savannas opening up around the edges of the basin and in the higher lands around it. The trees in the area were likely nut or seed-bearing trees but more research is needed to know for sure. Wear on the teeth found show that 'nuts, seeds, and hard fruit may have been an important component to the diet of this species', though they still ate significant portions of softer forest fruits. Examination of their tooth enamel also show that they largely ate food 'from trees and shrubs along with nongrassy forbs and herbs and their fruits' with some grasses or sedges with about 90% of their diet coming from the former, though they also might have eaten insects that ate the former as well.

By 宜蘭第一公民 - This file was derived from: Australopithecus afarensis Cleveland Museum.jpg, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=137846047

For months, herder Ali Bereino had been trying to get a job working for a team of fossil hunters in northeastern Ethiopia. The Afar man hung around, watching and learning. One day in February 2016, Bereino dug a burrow to keep his baby goats safe from hyenas. He noticed teeth protruding from the hard-packed sand and pulled out a jawbone, which he brought to the team's leader, Ethiopian paleoanthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassie of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in Ohio. Shoveling aside nearly half a meter of old goat droppings and sieving through sediment, the team unearthed the nearly complete skull of an enigmatic human ancestor, the oldest member of the genus that eventually led to our own.

In a remarkable evolutionary windfall, fossil hunters have discovered neatly fitting halves of a nearly complete, 3.8-million-year-old hominid skull. This unexpected specimen shines some light on poorly understood, early members of the human evolutionary family.

The East African skull, which turned up at Ethiopia’s Woranso-Mille site, has been classified as Australopithecus anamensis. It is the oldest known species in a hominid genus that includes Australopithecus afarensis, known best for Lucy’s 3.2-million-year-old partial skeleton (SN: 10/28/14).

The research team, led by paleoanthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassie of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, describes its analysis of the skull in two papers published online August 28 in Nature.

“This specimen provides the first glimpse of the face of Australopithecus anamensis,” Haile-Selassie said during an Aug. 27 news conference. The skull, which is slightly larger than a modern adult human’s fist, also includes the first good example of an A. anamensis braincase.

A discovery at an Ethiopian desert site of a nearly complete, 3.8-million-year-old Australopithecus anamensis skull is letting researchers reconstruct what the ancient individual looked like and its relationship to Lucy’s species.

For early-hominid investigators, “this is the specimen we have been waiting for,” says paleoanthropologist Carol Ward of the University of Missouri in Columbia. Ward was not part of the Woranso-Mille team.

Until now, A. anamensis fossils consisted only of partial upper and lower jaws, isolated teeth, a braincase fragment and some lower-body bones (SN: 2/18/15). Those specimens, previously unearthed in Kenya and Ethiopia, date to between 4.2 million and 3.9 million years ago.

Then, on February 10, 2016, a member of the Woranso-Mille team noticed the lower part of a hominid skull protruding from eroding sediment. Later that day, Haile-Selassie found the braincase lying on the ground about three meters from the initial find. Soil sieving produced additional skull fragments.