In 1999 a team of scientists, led by Tim White from the
University of California,
Berkeley, were wandering
Ethiopia in search of
fossils when they stumbled across an ancient
hippopotamus skull that had been butchered for some ancient meal. To their surprise not far from it, embedded in the
sediments of an old river bed near the village of
Herto they found something else. Something far more exciting and far more important to the
scientific community.
They found a new
subspecies of
human.
For years people have wondered about
the missing link, that step of
evolution that came between our heavily brow-ridged ancestors,
Homo neanderthalensis and modern humans.
The earliest modern human we had been aware of previously was
Cro-Magnon, who lived "35 000
BP to the end of the last
Ice Age a little over 10,000 years ago." Prior to him all we had was
Neanderthal man, who lived 150,000 to 100,000 years ago. That leaves quite a gap.
The Herto
hominids, as they are currently being dubbed, have been aged at 160,000 years old.
Wait, wait, wait. You said this was modern man. How is that possible if it's older than Neanderthal man? You're right! That's the most exciting part of this discovery!
These three skulls are older than Neanderthal man, and yet they have both primitive and modern features. They are the oldest human fossils with characterists of modern man,
Homo sapiens sapiens. But they also have strange markings unlike anything we've seen before on remains.
The skulls, two adult's and one child's, all have a strange pattern of cuts marked in them. Not
random scratches left from bones being tossed, or caused by drifting at the bottom of the river and dragged across rocks. No, these were
deliberate marks. At first they thought maybe it was some form of
cannibalism or something. The tools used to skin the bones would have left cut marks behind. But it didn't take long to rule that out. The marks have a pattern to them, and are similar on all three skulls, suggesting that perhaps the remains were marked in some kind of
ceremony. This could mean they had
religious beliefs concerning their
dead. They believe it is an indication of an ancient
mortuary practice. We won't know for sure. Not yet.
What we do know is this:
- That they were found near an ancient river bed and with hippopotamus remains shows the animals were in their diet. We can't be sure if they were hunting them or just scavenging off their bones, but at least we know they were eating meat.
- The child's skull was far smoother than the adults, had been handled more. This could mean that the death of a child was considered a greater loss than the adults. That's just speculation at this point, but clearly the child's skull had some kind of importance.
Along with the skulls were some other fragments of bone that came from other Herta hominids. The final excited buzz surrounding the discovery of this new subspecies in Ethiopia, is that it supports the
Out of Africa theory. The barrier in this theory had always been a lack of finds dating between 100,000 and 300,000 years ago. The Herto hominids have provided the link between
archaic African fossils and modern Late
Pleistocene humans, making the idea that we all came from Africa that much closer to
fact than theory.
References:
CNN, http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/science/06/11/ethiopia.skulls/index.html
Tim White, Pleistocene Homo sapiens from Middle Awash, Ethiopia, Nature Magazine, June 2003.