Discovery: three species of men in South Africa 2 million years ago

A researcher working on a skull (illustration image). Getty / OJO Images

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It is a discovery which reshuffles some cards and which has the merit of taking us very far from the coronavirus. In South Africa, two million years ago, researchers discovered the presence of Homo erectus, one of our ancestors, and, a priori unique, it shared the territory with two other ancestral human species today now extinct: Australopitheque and Paranthropus. This research is published in the journal Science.

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Two million years ago, South Africa changed: the climate changed,
meadows appear, forests recede. All this had a major effect on the inhabitants of the time.

Renaud Joannes-Boyau is the co-author of this study. He is the director of the geo-archeology and archeometry laboratory at the University of Southern Cross in Australia:

" We have a replacement in the great apes of the region," he explains . That is to say that during the previous million years, we have Australopithecus which dominates the environment. We also have Paranthropus which appears and we see Homo erectus which also appears around 2 million years ago. This is what we prove in this paper. As a result of this, Australopithecus , it is no longer found in the fossil layers, so we know that we have a climate change which certainly favored Homo erectus compared to Australopithecus . "

But for researchers it is a surprise to see Homo erectus so early in South Africa: “ We do not know where Homo erectus comes from. It has been proposed for example that Australopithecus sediba was one of its ancestors, but unfortunately, we see in the paper that has just been published, that sediba lives at the same time as Homo erectus. "

Other species are suspected to be ancestors of the genus homo, there is Australopithecus africanus, he also lived in South Africa.

► Also listen: When and how did we become human?

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  • Paleontology
  • South Africa
  • History
  • Archeology
  • Research

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