NEW FOSSILS DISRUPTS OLD IDEAS OF HOMO HABILIS AND HOMO ERECTUS!

Two hominid fossils discovered in Kenya are challenging a long-held view of human evolution as reported in Nature August 2007.

The broken upper jaw-bone and intact skull from humanlike creatures, or hominids, are making a big splash in the paleoanthropolgist-world!

Previously, the hominid Homo habilis was thought to have evolved into the more advanced Homo erectus , which evolved into us.

Now, habilis and erectus are thought to be sister species that overlapped in time. The new fossil evidence reveals an overlap of about 500,000 years during which Homo habilis and Homo erectus must have co-existed in the Turkana basin area, the region of East Africa where the fossils were unearthed.

"Their co-existence makes it unlikely that Homo erectus evolved from Homo habilis," said co-author Professor Meave Leakey, palaeontologist and co-director of the Koobi Fora Research Project.

The jaw bone was attributed to Homo habilis because of its distinctive primitive dental characteristics, and was dated to around 1.44 million years ago. It is the youngest specimen in time of this species ever found.

The skull was assigned to the species Homo erectus despite being a similar size to that of a habilis skull. Most other erectus skulls found have been considerably larger. Analysis showed the skull to be about 1.55 million years old. The new dates indicate that the two species must have lived side by side.

If Homo erectus had evolved from habilis and stayed within the same location then both must have been in direct competition for the same resources. "The fact that they stayed separate as individual species for a long time suggests that they had their own distinct ecological niches, thus avoiding direct competition," Professor Leakey explained.

Professor Chris Stringer, head of human origins at London's Natural History Museum, said: "Both were apparently stone tool-makers, but one possibility is that the larger and perhaps more mobile erectus species was an active hunter, while habilis scavenged or caught small prey."

Fred Spoor, professor of developmental biology at University College London, and co-author of the paper, told the BBC News website: "It's always possible that Homo habilis lived, let's say, 2.5 million years ago and then in another part of Africa, away from the Turkana basin, an isolated population evolved into Homo erectus ." After a sufficient amount of time to allow both species to develop different adaptations and lifestyles, Homo erectus could have then found its way to the Turkana basin. With separate "ecological niches", both species could co-exist without direct competition for resources.

"But that is a much more complex proposition," Professor Spoor explained, "the easiest way to interpret these fossils is that there was an ancestral species that gave rise to both of them somewhere between two and three million years ago."

The researchers dismiss the idea that the small size of the skull could be a result of it belonging to a youngster.

"By studying how the skull bones are fused together we discovered it belonged to a fully grown young adult rather than a developing juvenile erectus," said Professor Spoor.

Dr Leakey's team discovered the two fossils in Turkana, northern Kenya, in 2000, but it took seven years of painstaking research and laboratory work by the Koobi Fora Research Project in Kenya to uncover their importance

Story from BBC NEWS