Aug. 22, 2007 — Ten million-year-old fossils discovered in Ethiopia show that humans and apes probably split millions of years earlier than widely thought, according to a study released Wednesday.
The handful of teeth from the earliest direct ancestors of modern gorillas ever found — one canine and eight molars — also leave virtually no doubt, the study's authors and experts said, that both humans and modern apes did indeed originate from Africa.
The near total absence to date of traces on the continent of apes from this period had led many scientists to conclude that the shared line from which humans and living great apes emerged had taken a long evolutionary detour through Eurasia.
But the study, published in the British journal Nature, "conclusively demonstrates that the Last Common Ancestor (of both man and ape) was strictly an African phenomenon," commented paleoanthropologist Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University in Ohio.
Lovejoy described the fossils as "a critically important discovery," a view echoed by several other scientists who had read the paper or seen the artifacts.
"This is a major breakthrough in our understanding of the origin of humanity," Yohannes Haile-Selassie, a physical anthropologist at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, said.
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The most startling implication of the find, the scientists agree, is that our human progenitors diverged from today's great apes — including gorillas, orangutans and chimpanzees — several million years earlier than widely accepted research based on molecular genetics had previously asserted.
The trail in the hunt for physical evidence of our human ancestors goes cold some six or seven million years ago.
