New research suggests that the fossilized remains of some of humanity’s earliest ancestors are much older than scientists thought. This monumental discovery is so striking that it could even rewrite human history.
New research has been conducted on fossils found in the ‘Cradle of Humankind’ (a cave called Sterkfontein) in South Africa, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The research revealed that the fossils are 1 million years older than estimated. This discovery caused great excitement in the scientific world.
Many fossils, including those of a cave woman called ‘Mrs. Ples’, remained buried for thousands of years in the caves of South Africa, known as the Cradle of Humankind.
Now modern testing methods show that the first known group of humans traveled the world between 3.4 and 3.7 million years ago.
EVERYTHING CAN BE RESHAPED
This new timeline could reshape common understandings of human evolution and also prove that there are more likely and understandable ways in which our ancestors evolved into humans.
For years, scientists believed that the species Australopithecus africanus, whose fossils were found in the Sterkfontein caves near Johannesburg, was less than 2.6 million years old.
The underground complex has uncovered more remains of early humans than anywhere else in the world. This includes the almost complete skull of an early cave woman, nicknamed Mrs. Ples, discovered in 1947.
THEY WERE VERY SHORT IN STATURE
According to the Smithsonian Museum, the bipedal species was much shorter than modern humans. Males averaged 138 cm in height and females 115 cm.
But new radioactive dating techniques show that Ms. Ples and others discovered in her vicinity are actually a million years older than thought.
The researchers found the revised age by testing the sediment around the fossils for levels of a rare isotope that is formed when rocks are exposed to cosmic rays before they fall into the cave.
Previously, scientists believed that the hominids Australopithecus africanus were too young to have evolved into the genus homo (including sapiens), our ancestors that roamed the earth about 2.2 million years ago.
TIME WAS ENOUGH
New findings now show that our ancestors had a million more years to make this evolutionary leap: This raises the possibility that Ms. Ples and the species she was part of were the ancestors of early humans.
As a result, the species whose 3.2 million-year-old remains of Australopithecus afarensis have been found in Africa existed on Earth at the same time as the ape known as Lucy, long considered the species that gave rise to the earliest humans.
THE LINE OF EVOLUTION IS NOT STRAIGHT
Experts suggest that the updated timeline means that two species could have interacted and reproduced, complicating our picture of where humans came from, and that it may not be such a simple evolutionary line.
According to Laurent Bruxelles, a French scientist who was part of the research team, this means that our family tree is ‘more like a bush’.
