New discoveries of Australopithecus and Homo from Ledi-Geraru, Ethiopia

The time interval between about three and two million years ago is a critical period in human evolution—this is when the genera Homo and Paranthropus first appear in the fossil record and a possible ancestor of these genera, Australopithecus afarensis, disappears. In eastern Africa, attempts to test hypotheses about the adaptive contexts that led to these events are limited by a paucity of fossiliferous exposures that capture this interval. Here we describe the age, geologic context and dental morphology of new hominin fossils recovered from the Ledi-Geraru Research Project area, Ethiopia, which includes sediments from this critically underrepresented period. We report the presence of Homo at 2.78 and 2.59 million years ago and Australopithecus at 2.63 million years ago. Although the Australopithecus specimens cannot yet be identified to species level, their morphology differs from A. afarensis and Australopithecus garhi. These specimens suggest that Australopithecus and early Homo co-existed as two non-robust lineages in the Afar Region before 2.5 million years ago, and that the hominin fossil record is more diverse than previously known. Accordingly, there were as many as four hominin lineages living in eastern Africa between 3.0 and 2.5 million years ago: early Homo¹, Paranthropus², A. garhi³, and the newly discovered Ledi-Geraru Australopithecus.