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"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The rolling hills northwest of Johannesburg are famous for fossils of human-like creatures called hominins. Because of this, the area is known as the Cradle of Humankind.

"During our field school excavations at Drimolen, a student began uncovering a cluster of fragments. We could see that they were parts of a skull. But they weren't immediately identifiable," says Ms Stephanie Baker.

[...] Fossils that are millions of years old often come out of the soil in fragments. The fragments need to be rebuilt before researchers can confidently identify what kind of animal they came from.

"Over the course of the field season, more and more fragments were uncovered. We began piecing them together. No one could decide what this skullcap was from, until one night it all came together—and we realized we were looking at a hominin," she says. They named the skullcap DNH 134.

The next question was—what kind of hominin? The Cradle of Humankind has several different species of human ancestors and the Drimolen site had at least two kinds.

"This find really challenged us. We compared the assembled skullcap to all of the other examples of hominins in the Cradle area. Eventually, its teardrop shape and relatively big brain cavity meant we were looking at Homo erectus," says Baker.

Homo erectus is one of our direct human ancestors and is best known for migrating out of Africa into the rest of the world.

These hominins walked upright and were a more human-like species than the other hominins found in the Cradle. They had shorter arms and longer legs. They could walk and run for longer distances over the African grasslands than the others.

Once the question of 'which species?" was answered, two other huge questions presented themselves. How long ago was this individual alive? And how old were they when they died?

The researchers knew that no other Homo erectus fossils had ever been found in South Africa before. Even more surprising was the time period suggested by the soil layers the skull fragments were found in."Before we found DNH 134, we knew that the oldest Homo erectus in the world was from Dmanisi in Georgia dating to 1.8 million years ago," says Baker.

[...] Then the research team used every possible dating technique available to get the most accurate possible date for the deposit. This included Palaeomagnetic dating, Electron spin resonance, Uranium lead dating, and faunal dating.

"We collated all of the dates from each of these techniques and together they showed that we had a very precise age. We now know that the Drimolen Main Quarry and all of the fossils in it, are dated from 2.04 to 1.95 million years ago," says Baker.

That means that DNH 134 is much older than the next oldest Homo erectus in Africa; and from Georgia.

"The age of the DNH 134 fossil shows that Homo erectus existed 150,000 to 200,000 years earlier than previously thought," says Professor Andy Herries. Herries is the project co-director with Ms Baker and lead researcher. He is Head of the Department of Archaeology and History, at La Trobe University in Australia and an associate in the Palaeo-Research Institute at UJ.

-- submitted from IRC

More information: A.I.R. Herries el al., "Contemporaneity of Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and early Homo erectus in S. Africa," Science (2020). science.sciencemag.org/cgi/doi … 1126/science.aaw7293

"All Who Wander Are Not Lost," Science (2020). science.sciencemag.org/cgi/doi … 1126/science.abb4590

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