2.6-million-year-old jaw fossil challenges long-held ideas about early hominins

A fragmentary jaw has filled a conspicuous gap in Ethiopia’s rich record of human evolution. The roughly 2.6-million-year-old fossil places Paranthropus in the Afar region for the first time, more than 1,000 kilometers north of its previously known northern limit.The discovery comes from Mille-Logya, where ancient sediments preserve evidence of changing environments and several early hominins. A team led by University of Chicago paleoanthropologist Zeresenay Alemseged reports the finding in Nature. Their analysis combines comparisons of jaw anatomy with micro-CT scans of structures hidden inside the fossil.The specimen changes where this distinctive group of human relatives is known to have lived. It also challenges explanations that treated its absence from northeastern Ethiopia as a biological restriction. A missing fossil, the authors argue, had been mistaken for a missing population.A missing relative in a fossil-rich regionThe Afar sedimentary basin documents approximately six million years of hominin evolution.