(Picture of a skull, believed to be 1.5 million years old, and part of a jawbone that's nearly as old - by KAREL PRINSLOO / AP).
On 9 August 2007, a peer-reviewed research article was published in the scientific journal, Nature ("Implications of new early Homo fossils from Ileret, east of Lake Turkana, Kenya" by F. Spoor, M. G. Leakey, P. N. Gathogo, F. H. Brown, S. C. Antón, I. McDougall, C. Kiarie, F. K. Manthi & L. N. Leakey, Nature, 448, 688-691).
This work raised interesting evolutionary questions about our ancestors.
The editor of the Nature journal wrote the following editorial which both summarises the key findings and significance of this work. The following is the text of this editorial (you can also access it here):
"The hominin species Homo habilis and the generally larger and later Homo erectus are often regarded as two points on a single evolutionary lineage, separated only by time. The case for that view was strengthened by the interpretation of the small, primitive skulls from Dmanisi in Georgia as morphological intermediates. But new fossil discoveries tell a different story. A particularly small Homo erectus skull, and jaw material from a late-surviving specimen of Homo habilis, were found in contexts that suggest that the two species coexisted in the Lake Turkana basin in Kenya for almost half a million years. As well as overlapping in time, H. habilis and H. erectus overlapped in size as well. A high degree of sexual dimorphism in H. erectus may be a factor in this".
A story about this work was also reported in Seattle times
