UNIVERSITY OF UTAH MEDIA RELEASE
NOTE TO EDITORS: Frank Brown and Patrick Gathogo will hold a news conference at 10 a.m. MST Weds. March 21 in the lobby outside the dean's office on the 2nd floor of the William Browning Bldg. at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
Strictly embargoed by the journal Nature for release at noon MST Weds March 21, 2001
Contacts:Frank Brown, geologist, office (801) 581-8767, home (801) 596-2554, [email protected]Patrick Gathogo, geology undergraduate, office (801) 581-4761, home (801) 596-2554Lee Siegel, science writer, office (801) 581-8993, cell (801) 244-5399, [email protected]Coralie Alder, public relations director, office (801) 581-5180, cell (801) 556-8405
See material beneath this news release for information on photos, contacts outside Utah and a copy of a related news release from the National Museums of Kenya.
SKULL OF NEW EARLY HUMAN RELATIVE FOUND IN KENYADid Humans Descend from Lucy or From Newly Discovered Creature?
March 21, 2001 -- After the partial skeleton of a 3.2-million-year-old human relative known as Lucy was found in Ethiopia in 1974, many researchers believed her species -- Australopithecus afarensis -- was the ancestor of modern humans. Now, in a stunning discovery, scientists working in Kenya have found the skull and partial jaw of a completely different genus and species, with a flattened face and small molar teeth much different than those of afarensis. The discovery of the 3.2- to 3.5-million-year-old fossils raises the question of whether modern humans descended from Lucy's species or from the newly discovered species.
"We've always assumed Lucy was our ancestor and now we need to re-evaluate that idea," said geologist Frank Brown, dean of the College of Mines and Earth Sciences at the University of Utah.
Discovery of the fossils of Kenyanthropus platyops -- meaning flat-faced human from Kenya -- will be reported in the March 22 issue of the journal Nature by a team led by paleoanthropologist Meave Leakey of the National Museums of Kenya. Brown and University of Utah geology undergraduate Patrick Nduru Gathogo co-authored the study, along with Fred Spoor of University College London, Ian McDougall of The Australian National University in Canberra and Christopher Kiarie and Louise Leakey of the National Museums of Kenya. Louise Leakey is Meave Leakey's daughter.
The field work was funded by the National Geographic Society, except the geology work by Utah researchers was financed by the L.S.B. Leakey Foundation.
By studying the geology of volcanic ash and other sediments in Kenya's Lake Turkana basin, Brown, Gathogo and McDougall helped determine the age of the new fossils, including the 3.5-million-year-old skull.
"In the absence of any other fossils in the time between about 3.8 million and 3 million years ago, the only possible human ancestor that could be claimed was Australopithecus afarensis," Brown said. "Now that we have a new form of early hominid from the same time period that is quite distinct from afarensis, the anthropologists will have to decide which of these forms of early human actually lies in our ancestral tree. It cannot be both."
The study in Nature scrupulously avoids taking a position on which species may be the direct ancestor of modern people.
"Kenyanthropus shows persuasively that at least two lineages [of early human relatives] existed as far back as 3.5 million years," Meave Leakey said in a statement issued by the National Museums of Kenya. "The early stages of human evolution are more complex than we previously thought."
The smaller molars in Kenyanthropus suggest it probably had a different diet than Australopithecus, so both could have lived in the same area at the same time without directly competing for food, Leakey and Spoor said.
The Kenyanthropus platyops fossils were discovered in 1998 and 1999, with the skull found in August 1999 by Justus Erus, a Kenyan research assistant working with Meave Leakey near the Lomekwi River in the western Turkana basin in northern Kenya. Erus noticed a tooth protruding from the mudstone sediment. Gathogo was there at the time.
"I knew what they found without them telling me," said Gathogo, a native of Kenya who will graduate from the University of Utah this spring. "Having seen hominid fossils for a long time, it was obvious it was a hominid. ยท Everyone was so excited we started rejoicing."
Brown and Gathogo had suggested Leakey look for fossils in the area where Kenyanthropus platyops ultimately was found because they noticed lots of undisturbed antelope and hippopotamus fossils there, indicating it had not yet been picked over by field crews. The fossil was found soon after Brown flew home to Salt Lake City.
The skull apparently is the oldest known, nearly complete cranium of any form of early human.
Brown said the Kenyanthropus discovery illustrates that "at almost every time in the past back to 4 million years, there were two or more species of hominid existing on Earth. So where we used to see a very simple ladder of evolution from one form to the next, the current thinking is that the evolutionary history of man and manlike creatures is more like a bush with many dead ends and only one stem that leads all the way to us."
Kenyanthropus platyops resembles skull 1470 found in the eastern Turkana basin in the 1970s. Called Homo rudolfensis by some researchers and a member of genus Australopithecus by others, the Nature article suggests researchers now must consider if it instead descended from Kenyanthropus.
Brown, Gathogo and McDougall estimated the Kenyanthropus skull's age by indirectly dating surrounding layers of tuff, which is rock deposited when ash from volcanic eruptions in Ethiopia was carried to the Turkana region by rivers and wind. Brown has worked with Richard and Meave Leakey since 1980, helping determine ages for fossils they found.
"It's immensely satisfying," Brown said.
The new study lists three dozen teeth, jaw fragments and other fossils found in the same rock formation as the Kenyanthropus skull and that appear to be different than Lucy's species. Spoor said only the skull and a partial upper jaw are confirmed as belonging to the new species. The others ultimately will be studied to determine if they also are fossils from Kenyanthropus. One of them is a temporal bone -- from the skull's ear region -- that Gathogo found in 1998.
Before enrolling at Utah in 1999, Gathogo attended Kenya Polytechnic and did field work with Meave Leakey, who encouraged him to work with various geologists. Brown invited Gathogo to attend the university in Salt Lake City.
"As an undergraduate, Patrick was the best person I'd seen in the field for years -- very quick at learning things, very observant," Brown said.
NOTES:Downloadable photographs of the skull, of University of Utah geologists Frank Brown and Patrick Gathogo, and of Gathogo and Meave Leakey in the field may be found, along with this news release, at http://www.utah.edu/unews/032101_cranium.html
An embargoed National Museums of Kenya news release on this discovery, including contact information on all co-authors, is reprinted below and also is available as a pdf file that can be downloaded from http://www.utah.edu/unews/032101_NMK.pdf
To obtain the skull photo by e-mail, as well as additional photos Meave Leakey, contact National Geographic Society representatives Shriti Sinha at (202) 775-6159 or [email protected] or Chris Pollock at (202) 857-7760 or [email protected]
For interviews with Meave Leakey, contact Barbara Moffet at the National Geographic Society at (202) 857-7756 or [email protected]
University of Utah Marketing & Communications201 S Presidents Circle, Room 308Salt Lake City, Utah 84112-9017(801) 581-6773 fax: 585-3350-----------
NATIONAL MUSEUMS OF KENYAPRESS RELEASE
EMBARGOED: Not for print, radio, television, electronic or any other form of news transmission UNTIL 21 MARCH 2001 at 19:00 GMT (14:00 EST)
KENYAN FOSSIL FINDS THROW NEW LIGHT ON HUMAN EVOLUTION
NAIROBI, KENYA, 20 March, 2001 -- Researchers at the National Museums of Kenya have unearthed fossils belonging to a new genus of human ancestor, Kenyanthropus platyops (1), with profound implications for our understanding of our early human ancestry.The new finds, described in an article in the March 22nd issue of the prominent scientific journal Nature, are between 3.5 and 3.2 million years old and were recovered in 1998 and 1999 during palaeontological field work sponsored by the National Geographic Society.
Since the early 1980s, many scientists have believed that there was a single common human ancestor, which gave rise to successive species within the past 3 million years. This ancestral species, Australopithecus afarensis, is best known from the partial skeleton discovered in Ethiopia in 1974 and popularly known as "Lucy". However, the newly discovered Kenyan fossils, which include jaws and teeth in addition to a skull, are from the same time interval as Australopithecus afarensis, but are remarkably different. For example, the new Kenyanthropus skull has a much flatter face than Australopithecus. Hence, Meave Leakey says "Kenyanthropus shows persuasively that at least two lineages existed as far back as 3.5 million years; the early stages of human evolution are more complex than we previously thought."
Of particular scientific interest amongst the new finds is the reasonably complete skull which was discovered by research assistant Justus Erus who was working with Meave and Louise Leakey near the Lomekwi River, in northern Kenya. In addition to a flat face,the skull of Kenyanthropus has particularly small molar teeth. Both tooth size and face shape relate to the way a species chews its food. Therefore, the differences between Kenyanthropus and Australopithecus probably show that they had different diets and could have existed side by side without direct competition for food resources.
The team working on the new finds included Christopher Kiarie who carried out the painstaking laboratory preparation of the fossils, Frank Brown and Patrick Gathogo (University of Utah) who studied the earth layers in which the fossils were found, and IanMcDougall (Australian National University) who did the isotopic dating of these layers. The analysis of the fossils has been made by palaeontologists Fred Spoor (University College London), and Meave and Louise Leakey.
The National Geographic Society has sponsored Kenyan palaeontological field work by the National Museums of Kenya in the Lake Turkana basin since 1968. In addition, the geological studies for these finds were supported by the Leakey Foundation (USA) andthe isotopic dating was supported by the Australian National University.
CONTACT INFORMATION:Meave LeakeyOn March 21 st and 22 nd she can be contacted through Barbara Moffet (below); and subsequently, until mid-April, through Carlton Sedgeley (Tel: +1 -- 212 - 355 7700; e-mail: [email protected]).From mid-April, e-mail: [email protected]; Address as for Louise Leakey.
Fred Spoor (general info)Evolutionary Anatomy Unit, Dept. of Anatomy & Developmental BiologyUniversity College London, Rockefeller Bld, University Street, London WC1E 6JJ, U.K.Tel: +44 - 20 - 7679 6154, Fax: +44 - 20 - 7209 0346, e-mail: [email protected]
Louise LeakeyDivision of Palaeontology, National Museums of Kenya,P.O. Box 40658, Nairobi, KenyaTel: +254 - 2 -- 341471, Fax: +254 -- 2 -- 741424, e-mail: [email protected]
Frank BrownDept. of Geology & Geophysics, University of Utah, Salt Lake City UT 84112, U.S.A.Tel. +1 -- 801 -- 581 -- 8767, e-mail: [email protected]
Ian McDougallAfter 25 March, 2001: Research School of Earth Sciences,The Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200 Australia,Tel: +61-2-6125-4136, e-mail: [email protected]
PhotographsAvailable from the National Geographic Society, Washington DC, U.S.A.Barbara Moffet (Tel: +1 -- 202 -- 857 7756; e-mail: [email protected]),or Shriti Sinha (Tel: +1 -- 202 -- 775 6159).
END OF RELEASE FROM NATIONAL MUSEUMS OF KENYA
(1) From the Greek anthropos meaning human, platus, meaning flat, and opsis, meaning face; thus "the flat-facedhuman from Kenya".
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