Early Homo and Australopithecus Co-Existed in Ethiopia before 2.5 Million Years Ago

The new fossils of hominins submitted in the Ledi-Geraru research project area in the AFAR region in Ethiopia suggest the presence at the start Homo to 2.78 and 2.59 million years and a species previously unknown Australopithecus to 2.63 million years.

Reconstruction of the medico-legal face of Australopithecus Afarensis. Image credit: Cicero Moraes / CC by-SA 3.0.

The time interval between 3 and 2 million years is a critical period of human evolution.

This is when genres Homo And Paranthropus first appear in the fossil file and a possible ancestor of these genres, Australopithecus Afarensisdisappears.

“We used to consider human evolution as quite linear, with a stable march of an ancestor similar to a singing to modern Homo sapiens“Said the researcher at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, Brian Villmoare and his colleagues.

“Instead, humans branched up several times in different niches.”

“Our evolution model is not particularly unusual, and what happened to humans has reached all the other trees in life.”

“This is what we should find in the human fossils file.”

“Nature has experienced different ways of being a human, because the climate has become drier in East Africa, and earlier species of the APE type have disappeared.”

Dr. Villmoare and the co-authors found 13 hominine teeth on the Ledi-Geraru site in the Afar region in Ethiopia.

They determined that, although some of these fossils belong to the genre Homoa set of upper and lower teeth belong to a previously unknown species of the genus Australopithecus.

This new species is distinct from Australopithecus Afarensiswhich appears for the last time at around 2.95 million years and was discovered in Hadar nearby.

“The presence of the two species in the same place shows that human evolution is less linear and more similar to trees,” said Dr. Villmoare.

The Ledi-Geraru site is the same field site where in 2013, paleoanthropologists discovered the jaw of the first Homo Specimen never found at 2.8 million years.

“The new discoveries of Homo The sediment teeth from 2.6 to 2.8 million dollars confirm the antiquity of our line, “said Dr. Villmoare.

“We know what the teeth and the mandible of the first Homo Looks like, but that’s it.

“This emphasizes the critical importance of finding additional fossils to understand the differences between Australopithecus And HomoAnd potentially how they were able to overlap in the fossil folder in the same place. »»

“The Afar region is still an active rifting environment,” said Dr. Christopher Campisano, a geologist at Arizona State University.

“There were many volcanoes and tectonic activity and when these volcanoes broke out ashes, the ashes contained crystals called feldspaths which allow scientists to take them out with them.”

“We can go out with the eruptions that were happening on the landscape when they are deposited.”

“And we know that these fossils are prohibited between these eruptions, so we can go out with units above and below the fossils.”

“We go out with the volcanic ashes of the eruptions which were happening during their landscape.”

“This is a critical period for human evolution, as this new article shows,” said Professor Ramon Arrowsmith of the State University of Arizona.

“Geology gives us the age and the characteristics of the sedimentary deposits containing the fossils. It is essential for age control. ”

“Whenever you have an exciting discovery, if you are a paleontologist, you always know that you need more information,” said Dr. Kaye Reed, paleoecologist at Arizona State University.

“You need more fossils. This is why this is an important area to train people and so that people go out and find their own sites and find places where we have not yet found fossils. ”

“More fossils will help us tell the story of what happened to our ancestors a long time ago – but because we are the survivors that we know that it happened to us.”

The discovery is reported in an article published today in the journal Nature.

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B. Villmoare and al. New discoveries of Australopithecus And Homo from Ledi-Geraru, Ethiopia. Naturepublished online on August 13, 2025; DOI: 10.1038 / S41586-025-09390-4