hominins

Paranthropus has just turned up in a place it “wasn’t meant to be”. A newly described 2.6-million-year-old partial lower jaw from Ethiopia’s Afar region is the first known Paranthropus fossil ever found there, pushing the genus’ known range about 1,000 kilometers north of previous records. The discovery, reported in Nature , argues that Paranthropus was not a narrowly confined “nutcracker” specialist, but a versatile hominin able to live across a wider set of habitats - more like early Homo than many models allowed. The fossil (catalogued as MLP-3000) was recovered from the Mille-Logya research area, a site excavated since 2012 by a team led by paleoanthropologist Zeresenay Alemseged. As Alemseged notes in the University of Chicago release, the Afar has