New research has concluded that an early hominin species lived alongside Lucy, our 3.2-million-year-old bipedal ancestor. Scientists have named this new species Australopithecus deyiremeda. A team from the Cleveland Museum of Natural History first found the upper and lower jaw fossil of the hominin species in the Afar region of Ehtiopia. The team has deduced that this new species lived approximately 3.3 to 3.5 million years ago — and that several early human species lived, in fact, side-by-side in East Africa.
New early human has striking features
The newest early human species discovered has some particular physical characteristics that distinctly separate it from Lucy. For one, the size and shape of both its lower jaw and thick enamel teeth suggest that it had a different diet. It most likely consumed tougher and harder resources. Even though this new species shows clear similarities with the Australopithecus (the extinct genus of hominid), it branches away from the features of Ardipithecus, Kenyanthropus, Paranthropus and Homo. Information derived from an examination of the dental structure signals that it might have to be assigned to have its own anthropological category.
The newly discovered hominin species spurs on the continuing debate concerning early hominin diversity. There are some scientists who are skeptical about the new find, but the importance lies in raising questions about just how many early hominin species were living alongside one another in the same region at the time.
Early humans: sharing the same turf
The fossils of the new deyiremeda species were unearthed a mere 21.8 miles south of Hadar, Ethiopia, where Lucy was discovered. Anthropologists speculate that the two might have lived in closer territories than we think, and that more early hominin species than previously thought lived in close range to each other. One theory that supports this tells us that during the middle Pliocene time period (around 3.3 million years ago), the East African landscape was dotted with bountiful rivers, forests, woodlands and grasslands, allowing many species to thrive simultaneously.
It was an ecosystem that supported many habitats and the coexistence of different hominin species, but, as with many cases throughout ecological history, the habitats diminished, forcing species to compete for resources and for the less successful ones to face extinction.
