Date: 24 Apr 1999 20:04:57 -0000
From: Electronic Drum 
Subject: NEWS:  New Species Of Human Ancestor found in Africa

Electronic Drum

fyi folks, spread the word.....4 those interested, here's the url &
article from the Science magazine article referred to in the press story
appended below.

+++++++++++++++++++

the URL for this story is:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1999/04/990423073714.html

************************

Source: American Association For The Advancement Of Science
(http://www.aaas.org/)

Date: Posted 4/23/99


New Species Of Human Ancestor 

Plus Oldest Evidence Yet Of Tool-Assisted Meat-Eating,
Reported In 23 April 1999 Science 

Washington, DC --

Two-and-a-half-million-year-old cranial and tooth found in Ethiopia belong
to a previously unknown hominid that may have been the immediate
predecessor of humans, according to a team of Ethiopian, American, and
Japanese researchers. Team members also describe other fossils from the
same geological layer showing that hominids--though not necessarily the
newly identified species--were walking on humanly proportioned legs and
using stone tools to strip meat and scrape marrow from the bones of
antelopes and horses. This constitutes the earliest example yet of
tool-assisted meat-eating. Two reports describe the finds in the 23 April
1999 issue of Science. 

Researchers came across the fossils outside the small village of Bouri, a
hard two-day drive northeast of Addis Ababa. The site is located in a
harsh, desert region of Ethiopia called the Middle Awash, already famous
for other major discoveries such as the oldest known hominid, found by the
same team of researchers. The new hominid--dubbed Australopithecus garhi,
after the local people's word for "surprise"--possesses features that
place it at the forefront of one of the hottest debates in
paleoanthropologyfrom what evolutionary branch did the first humans
appear? 

"No one predicted garhi," said University of California-Berkeley biologist
Tim White, who co-led the team with Berhane Asfaw of Ethiopia's Rift
Valley Research Service. Instead, researchers have been looking in eastern
Africa for A. africanus, a smallish, upright-walking hominid known to have
roamed southern Africa two to three million years ago and thought by many
to be the best candidate for humanity's immediate forebear. But in
Science, the research team presents anatomical analyses and measurements
from the A. garhi fossils that they say sharply distinguish the new
species from A. africanus and from the other hominid species known to be
alive around the same time, including two robust species that eventually
died out. If anything, said White, A. garhi's big teeth and projecting
face best resemble an older East African species known as A. afarensis,
whose most famous representative goes by the name of Lucy. 

In addition to the cranial and tooth remains of A. garhi, the research
team found in the same geological layer arm and leg bones from several
other hominid individuals. Without associated dentition, these individuals
can't reliably be assigned to a species. Intriguing, though, is the
distinctive way in which their relative limb proportions are intermediate
between that of apes and humans. That is, while "Lucy" (3.2 million years
ago) had upper arms that were long relative to her legs, and H. erectus
(1.7 million years ago) had the shortened forearms and longer femurs of
modern humans, the unidentified Bouri hominids were smack in the
middle--showing that the femur lengthened at least one million years
before the forearm shortened. What this may imply about hominid locomotion
and other behaviors, and what pressures this might have put on the
subsequent direction of human evolution, remains to be determined. 

While walking around on human-like legs, the unidentified Bouri hominids
were apparently also using stone tools to fillet meat and pull marrow from
the bones of large animals that thrived in the open, grassy plains once
surrounding an ancient lake. Researchers found one of the hominid legs
buried next to catfish and antelope bones, the latter of which showed
definitive cut marks from stone tools. Scattered elsewhere throughout the
same geological layer were other antelope and horse bones with similar
tell-tale signs of butchery--for example, a lower jaw whose tongue
presumably had been cut out and leg bones purposely fractured at both
ends, indicative of marrow extraction. 

Such unprecedented and unique access to high-fat meat and marrow would
have constituted a "dietary revolution," says White, one that "would have
opened up a whole new world of food" and possibly fueled humanity's
eventual migration out of Africa. 

The tools themselves, however, have proved frustratingly elusive. The
researchers found only a few isolated tools strewn about the surface of
the site and none during excavation. This left them unable to determine
the tools' ages or whether the tools belonged with the butchered bones. In
their report, the researchers suggest that the area around Bouri 2.5
million years ago lacked the natural features (such as large rushing
streams with cobbles or rock-outcroppings) that would have served as
source material for stone tools, and that therefore Bouri hominids had
been forced to carry in whatever tools they needed to exploit animal life
at the lake margins. Still, the site at Bouri begs comparison to another
2.5-million-year-old site at nearby Gona, Ethiopia, where in 1997 nearly
3,000 stone tools were found--the oldest stone tools yet discovered. In
contrast to Bouri, the Gona site lacked evidence of what the tools were
used for or who might have made them. The researchers argue that the Bouri
hominids, including A. garhi, must now be considered strong candidates for
the Gona tool-makers. 

The newly identified hominid fossils provide much-needed information about
what may have been happening in Africa two to three million years ago, a
crucial juncture in human evolutionary history. "You go into this period
with, in essence, bipedal big-toothed chimps and come out with meat-eating
large-brained hominids," said White. "That's a big change in a relatively
short time. We'd really like to know more about what happened there." 



Note:  This story has been adapted from a news release issued by American
Association For The Advancement Of Science for journalists and other
members of the public. If you wish to quote from any part of this story,
please credit American Association For The Advancement Of Science as the
original source. You may also wish to include the following link in any
citation:

Oldest Human Ancestor May Have Been Discovered

By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID
.c The Associated Press

WASHINGTON (April 23) -- The long list of human ancestors has a new
member, the earliest known 
tool user who was carving meat with sharp stones 2.5 million years ago in
Africa. 

So unexpected was the discovery of a skull and bones that researchers have
named the ancestor "garhi," meaning "surprise" in the local language of
Ethiopia's Afar desert.  A descendent of the species that produced the
famous Lucy skeleton in east Africa, the new hominid is a candidate for
earliest human ancestor, the researchers say in an article in today's
issue of the journal Science. 

Anthropologist Tim White of the University of California at Berkeley said
the new species "could turn out to be the link" between the genus Homo,
which includes modern humans -- Homo sapiens -- and its predecessor,
Australopithecus. 

"It is in the right place, at the right time, to be the ancestor of early
(humans), however defined," reported the team led by Berhane Asfaw of Rift
Valley Research Service in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and White. 

Not so sure, however, is anthropologist Bernard Wood of George Washington
University.  "I think it's always good news when people find more fossil
evidence," he said in a telephone interview, "but ... I don't think we can
be sure it's an ancestor of later" humans.  "What they've found is what
many of us were expecting, that there is quite a lot of variety in early
hominids ... in this particular period," Wood said. "I think it's ironic
in some ways that it's been called a surprise." 

The new species has been tentatively named Australopithecus garhi. It has
large teeth and a projecting face, somewhat similar to the well-known
fossil Lucy, who lived 3.2 million years ago and was of the
Australopithecus afarensis species, with apelike upper arms that were long
relative to her legs. 

By the time the more human-like Homo erectus developed, about 1.7 million
years ago, legs were longer and more human, and forearms had shortened.
Based on the relationship between arm and leg bones from a second
individual found near the new skull, garhi was between the two, with long,
human-like legs but not yet having shortened forearms. 

The skull was from a male, with a small brain case and a protruding jaw.
The individual whose arm and leg bones were found would have been about
4-feet-10, White said.  An antelope jaw and other animal bones found near
the garhi skeleton show cut marks from tools, perhaps the earliest
evidence of human tool use in butchering animals.  "All of a sudden this
is a bipedal primate with a difference," White said.  "We now have the
clearest evidence these very early hominids were butchering mammals and
were knowledgeable about the ... (marrow) within the bones, a highly
valuable food resource," he added. 

The presence of the tools and the bones together "doesn't prove that the
individual was the one who held the stone tool, but it's pretty strong
evidence," he went on.  The marks show the flesh was cut from the bones
and the bones were broken at both ends, indicating an effort to extract
the marrow, an important new food for hominids, according to a second
paper by a team led by White, the late Jean de Heinzelin of the Royal
Belgian Institute of Science and J. Desmond Clark, also at Berkeley. 

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copyright   18 march 1991

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