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A skull discovery of a 1.8 million-year-old skull has rocked the scientific community, and it wasn’t alone. There were skulls that had protruding foreheads, while others had short, flattened faces. Other skulls had simply enormous jaw muscles and big teeth, while others had gigantic heads to hold much bigger brains than scientists previously thought.
There was one thing that the skulls had in common, which was that they were all family. In fact, they were our family, our ancient family from around 2 million years ago.
The world’s first completely preserved adult hominid skull from the early Pleistocene era looks surprisingly different from other skulls of the same time period, which has given scientists a tremendous insight. Man’s early ancestors appeared as physically diverse as humans do today, and our family tree has looks to have fewer branches than today’s science books claim.
“It’s a really extraordinary find,” said paleoanthropologist Marcia S. Ponce de Leon in a press conference Wednesday when they were announcing the findings. “For the first time, we can see a population from the early Pleistocene. We only had individuals before. Now we can make comparisons and see the range of variation.”
The skull in the spotlight is a complete, 1.8-million-year-old ancestor of mankind, found in Dmanisi, Georgia, which is in eastern Europe. This is the fifth such skull from the same region and it’s known as of now as “Skull 5.” Scientists have not yet given the skull a true name as they did for Lucy, whos is the Africa
n skeleton found back in the 1970s. Lucy dates back 3.4 million years, making her an even more distant relative of modern humans.
Such artifacts are extremely rare, which makes studying them very difficult. Past skulls dating back 2 million-years-ago have showed distinct differences in shape, enough so that scientists have labeled them different species altogether. Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis, is one such example.
Skull 5 is different from the 4 other skulls recently found at Dmanisi. The Skull was found in 2005, and later matched up to a jaw found in 2000, which resulted in a complete skull. However, following 8 years of study, scientists on Thursday published a paper claiming that Skull 5 is simply not that different from other findings.
“The five Dmanisi individuals are no more different from each other than any five modern humans or chimpanzees,” said neurobiologist Christoph Zollikofer, who is a co-author of the paper with Ponce de Leon. Both scientists work at the Anthropological Institute and Museum in Zurich, Switzerland.
“The brain case is very small — around a third of [the size of] modern humans at 546 cubic centimeters — and at the same time, we have the face that is quite large, and the jaws are quite massive, and the teeth are big and large,” Leon explained.
“This is a strange combination of features that we didn’t know before in early homo,” she said. Even though such a skull shape was previously unknown, it was actually more similar to the others than it was different.
“Dmanisi is the first site where we can really look into and quantify variation in fossil hominid population,” Zollikofer said.
The site where it was discovered in more than interesting. David Lordkipanidze from the Georgian National Museum Tbilisi, Georgia — who is an author of yet a third paper — described the site as “a medieval city on a hilltop.”
There were signs of civilized life far more elaborate than previously understood. At the period of time the early hominids were walking around and about — 2 million years ago — the climate was temperate and relatively humid. The site was just a short distance from water, which was located on top of remnants of a lava flow. Scattered evidence of daily life remained to this day, as well, with a wide variety of plant and animal remains diversely spread about over an area spanning roughly 1.2 acres.
“We found stone tools and cut marks on animal bones, which indicate that hominids were actively involved in meat-processing,” Lordkipanidze said. One of the skulls found had a wound on its cheek, which could have come from a fight following an argument or a simple injury sustained by a fall.
“This was a place with stiff competition between carnivores and hominids. We found almost a hundred carnivores and it seems they were fighting for the carcasses. Fortunately for the hominids — and fortunately for us — they were not always successful.”
What other secrets the mountain may still be holding out on, is to be determined in time. But these ancient creatures, who had long legs and short arms yet smaller brains than us, do tell us that once-again we still do not have all the pieces to the puzzle that is the human story.
“We still have a lot to discover,” he said. It certainly looks like it.
