They found a missing link that rewrote the evolution of the human being

Published in the journal Nature, the result is due to two studies directed by Yohannes Haile-Selbadie of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Antonino Vazzana and Stefano Benazzi from the University of Bologna also participate.

"This skull seems destined to become another famous icon of human evolution," writes Fred Spoor of the British Natural History Museum.

The discovery, he adds, "will greatly influence our thinking about the evolutionary family tree of early hominids."

Discovered in 2016 in Ethiopia, the skull, extraordinarily well preserved, belonged to an adult male of the species Australopithecus anamensis, identified by studying the characteristics of the upper jaw and the canine.

In the same way, the experts have identified peculiarities never observed in this species. "The skull has a mixture of primitive and less primitive facial and cranial features that I did not expect to see in an individual"says Haile-Selbadie.

Some features are shared with successive species, while others have elements in common with older and more primitive hominid groups such as Ardipithecus and the Sahelanthropus.

"To date, we have had a big gap between the earliest known human ancestors, 6 million years old and Lucy dating back 2 to 3 million years ago. one of the interesting aspects of this discovery is that she Stephanie Melillo, co-author of the Max Planck German Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

The skull, as well as other fossils of the species A. afarensis, previously found in the area, shows that both species cohabited for 100,000 years.

This temporal overlap challenges the idea of ​​a linear transition between these two ancestors of man.

"We have thought – note Melillo – that A. anamensis has progressively been transformed into A. afarensis, but this new discovery suggests that the two species actually lived together.This changes our understanding of the evolutionary process" and, according to Haile- Selbadie, "a twist on our understanding of human evolution."