Could this fossil be the key linking humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans?
Fossils of human ancestors dating back 773,000 years may lie near its base homo sapiens The lineage represents a common ancestor of modern humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans.
A mandible of a newly discovered ancient human ancestor.
Hamza Mehimdate, Program Préhistoire de Casablanca
A trio of jaw bones, a leg bone and a handful of vertebrae and teeth found in Morocco may represent one of the last common ancestors of Neanderthals, Denisovans and modern humans.
new research Published today in Nature Bones unearthed over decades in and near a cave called Grotte à Hominides have been dated to about 773,000 years ago, during the era of the Last Common Ancestor. Homo Sapiens, Homo Neanderthalensis and the Denisovans (a group of humans spread across Asia and for which there is no agreed upon species name).
“We can say that the shared ancestry between these three species is probably in the Grotte à Hominides in Casablanca,” says study co-author Abderrahim Mohib, a prehistorian at the National Institute of Archeology and Heritage Sciences in Rabat, Morocco.
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The cave is part of a mine, where the first mandible was discovered in 1969. Another adult mandible and a series of vertebrae were found in 2008, and part of a child’s mandible was discovered in 2009. Hominin bones and animal remains form a group of fossils that appear to come from the den of a carnivore, perhaps a hyena. a of them hominin femur There are teeth marks in the cave that was excavated.
Mandibles from North Africa show divergence between fossil hominins and modern humans. The fossils shown are from Tighenif 3 of Algeria (upper left), ThI-GH-10717 from the Thomas Quarry in Morocco (upper right), and Jebel Irhoud 11 from Morocco (lower left), compared with the mandible of a recent modern human (lower rightAll specimens are shown on the same scale, allowing direct comparison of their size and shape.
Researchers weren’t able to learn much about this steady drip of hominin fossils until they figured out how old they were. Serena Perini, one of the study authors and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Milan, says the key to fixing this was a method called magnetostratigraphy. This method relies on the fact that the Earth’s magnetic field reverses every few million years. Polarity changes can be detected in iron-rich minerals. An overturning occurred 773,000 years ago, which allowed researchers to determine when the sediments around the hominin fossils were laid down.
As far as who the hominin bones belonged to, small physical characteristics on them point to an intermediate species – one that had some traits reminiscent of older African hominin species such as homo erectus and others that were similar to those seen in later African fossils and specimens from Eurasia, Mohib says. This suggests that the Moroccan fossils represent an intermediate species. They are similar in age to the Neandertal-like species of Spain homo ancestor It was previously suggested as a possible common ancestor of modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans. But the characteristics of the Grote A. hominid fossils are a mix of new and old.
“They display a combination of primitive and more advanced traits, indicating human populations close to this stage of divergence,” says Mohib. “They thus confirm the deep antiquity of the African roots of our species and highlight the important role of North Africa in key stages of human evolution.”
These ancestors could have looked quite different from any of these three human lineages, says Antonio Rosas Gonzalez, a paleontologist at the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Spain, who was not involved in the research but co-authored the paper. Editorial accompanying its publicationHe says that features such as a large, rounded skull and a prominent chin had not yet evolved, “Moroccan fossils document the beginning of a long evolutionary process,”
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