Africa

For three decades it lay in a museum drawer, an unremarkable piece of fossilized skull from a South African cave. It has now been identified as the oldest adult Homo erectus specimen found in Africa. Catalogued as DNH 127, the fragment dates to between 2.04 and 1.95 million years ago, roughly 200,000 years older than the adult Homo erectus remains from Dmanisi in Georgia. The study behind the announcement, published in Annals of Human Biology, shows that our early ancestors shared that landscape with a rival cousin who outnumbered them ten to one. Paranthropus Skull Find Suggests Distant Human Cousins Evolved Quickly Paranthropus – Our Most Mysterious Extinct Cousins (Video) Map of the Cradle of Humankind in Gauteng, South Africa