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 produced abundant Australopithecus and Homo fossils, so Paranthropus’ apparent absence had become “conspicuous and puzzling” to researchers.
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The fragments of the Paranthropus mandible after being assembled in the field by Professor Zeresenay Alemseged. (Image courtesy of Alemseged Research Group via EurekAlert!)
A Jawbone from Mille-Logya Raises Big Questions
The newly described specimen is a partial left mandible plus a molar crown, dated to about 2.6 million years ago using multiple methods, making it one of the oldest Paranthropus fossils known. The team used micro-CT scanning to examine internal structures, including tooth roots, details that can be especially diagnostic in robust australopiths.
New Scientist reports that the jaw was first spotted in January 2019, when a local assistant brought Alemseged part of a lower jawbone. Later the same day, the team found the crown of a left lower molar tooth, and CT scanning confirmed “telltale Paranthropus traits,” including jaw proportions and the complexity of tooth roots.
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Multiple views of the newly discovered Paranthropus mandible (MLP-3000-1) compared with other hominin jaws. (Image courtesy of Alemseged Research Group via EurekAlert!)
Versatile “Nutcracker” Cousins? Rethinking Early Hominin Life
Paranthropus has often been portrayed as a specialist lineage - big molars, thick enamel, powerful jaws - sometimes framed as a side branch that couldn’t keep up with the flexibility of early Homo. But the Afar jaw changes the geography of the story and, potentially, the ecological assumptions that came with it.
In the study, Alemseged directly challenges the idea that Paranthropus was restricted to southern regions by dietary specialization or excluded by competition, arguing instead that, “Paranthropus was as widespread and versatile as Homo,” and that its apparent absence from Afar was “an artifact of the fossil record.”
New Scientist also highlights that the Afar setting appears relatively open compared with some earlier Paranthropus contexts, supporting the idea that different populations could exploit different habitats. As Alemseged put it, “I think we might have inflated our understanding of that specialization.”
Telling Revelations for Human Development
At roughly 2.6 million years old, the Mille-Logya jaw sits close to a critical transition in human evolution, when multiple hominin lineages overlapped in Africa and early members of the genus Homo were emerging. The new fossil doesn’t just fill a blank spot on the map; it forces a careful re-check of how researchers model competition, niche separation, and dispersal among early hominins.
It also underscores something paleoanthropologists know too well: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. In Afar, one of the most intensively explored landscapes for early human fossils, the “missing Paranthropus” may have been missing mainly because the right rocks hadn’t been found, or the right fragments hadn’t surfaced yet.
Top image: Professor Zeresenay Alemseged sifts through unidentified fossil fragments in the field to find parts of a Paranthropus specimen. Source: Image courtesy of Alemseged Research Group via EurekAlert!
By Gary Manners
References
Alemseged, Z. 2026. New 2.6-million-year-old Paranthropus fossil reshapes understanding of early hominins. Available at: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1113024?
Alemseged, Z., Spoor, F., Reed, D., Barr, W.A., Geraads, D., Bobe, R., Wynn, J.G. 2026. Afar fossil shows broad distribution and versatility of Paranthropus. Available at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09826-x
Marshal, M., 2026. Ape-like hominin Paranthropus was more adaptable than we thought. Available at: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2512373-ape-like-hominin-paranthropus-was-more-adaptable-than-we-thought/
