When was the first hominid fossil found

Homo in the Middle Pleistocene: Hypodigms, variation, and species recognition. Evolutionary Anthropology 17 , Roebroeks, W. On the earliest evidence for habitual use of fire in Europe. Senut, B. First hominid from the Miocene Lukeino Formation, Kenya. Ward, C. Complete fourth metatarsal and arches in the foot of Australopithecus afarensis. Interpreting the posture and locomotion of Australopithecus afarensis : where do we stand? American Journal of Physical Anthropology S35 , White, T.

Ardipithecus ramidus and the paleobiology of early hominids. Young, N. The phylogenetic position of Morotopithecus. Journal of Human Evolution 46 , Did we destroy the Neanderthals? Did primates raft from Africa to South America? What influences the evolution of humans and our primate relatives today? What is it like to search for hominin fossils or to study wild apes? What tools can we use to study rare, endangered primates and help to conserve them in a rapidly changing world?

These are some of the diverse questions answered in this topic room. Our bodies are records of our evolution. Look at an unfolding embryo, a genome, or a skeleton and you will see our inner fishes, our inner mammals, our inner apes. We carry within us physical evidence of the developmental processes and biological traits that humans share with all — yes, all — other organisms.

What, if anything, unites primates as a single group, and how do primate adaptations reflects our evolutionary past? What did the earliest primates look like and how are they related to modern forms?

How has climate change influenced the diversification of different primate groups? How do primates navigate arboreal and terrestrial habitats? What processes are involved in fossilization and in dating fossils from the distant past? Why do many primates live in groups? Why do some male primates commit infanticide? Why do some females form strong bonds?

What do primates eat and how do they live in ecological communities with other animals? How do primates communicate? Do primates deceive each other? Unraveling the sociality and ecology of our closest living relatives, the non-human primates, can help us shed light on the selective pressures that shaped humans through evolutionary time.

Citation: Pontzer, H. Nature Education Knowledge 3 10 How did humans evolve into the big-brained, bipedal ape that we are today? This article examines the fossil evidence of our 6 million year evolution. Aa Aa Aa. References and Recommended Reading Anton, S. Science , Brunet, M. Nature , Dart, R. Nature , DeGiorgio, M. Journal of Human Evolution 38 , Green, R. A draft sequence of the Neandertal genome. Science , Harcourt-Smith, W.

Journal of Anatomy , Hublin, J. The origin of Neanderthals. Comptes Rendus Palevol 1 , Relethford, J. Heredity , Rightmire, G. Nevertheless, he said Ardi's species could be the direct ancestor of Lucy's species, which could be the direct ancestor of modern humans.

Without additional fossil evidence, however, connecting the individual or species dots is hazardous, White said. Many of the 47 authors are UC Berkeley faculty, postdocs, students and alumni, reflecting the strength and tradition of human origins research at UC Berkeley for the last century.

Skip to main content. Top stories:. Fossils of the Human Family: Timeline This timeline shows the fossils upon which our current understanding of human evolution is based.

The new fossil skeleton of Ardipithecus ramidus , nicknamed Ardi, fills a large gap before the Lucy skeleton, Australopithecus afarensis , but after the hominid line split from the line that led to today's chimpanzees. Science magazine. Six members of the Middle Awash Project comment on the significance of the skeleton in understanding human origins.

Primary Pictures Inc. The Oct. An international research team reconstructed the skeleton from fossil pieces discovered in the desert of the Middle Awash valley in Ethiopia. The immediate ancestors of humans were members of the genus Australopithecus.

The australopithecines or australopiths were intermediate between apes and people. Both australopithecines and humans are biologically similar enough to be classified as members of the same biological tribe--the Hominini.

All people, past and present, along with the australopithecines are hominins. We share in common not only the fact that we evolved from the same ape ancestors in Africa but that both genera are habitually bipedal , or two-footed, upright walkers.

By comparison, chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas are primarily quadrupedal , or four-footed. These creatures lived just after the divergence from our common hominid ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos, during the late Miocene and early Pliocene Epochs. The fossils have been tentatively classified as members of three distinct genera-- Sahelanthropus , Orrorin , and Ardipithecus. Sahelanthropus was the earliest, dating million years ago. Orrorin lived about 6 million years ago, while Ardipithecus remains have been dated to 5.

At present, the vote is still out as to whether any of these three primates were in fact true hominins and if they were our ancestors. The classification of Sahelanthropus has been the most in question. The earliest australopithecines very likely did not evolve until 5 million years ago or shortly thereafter during the beginning of the Pliocene Epoch in East Africa. The primate fossil record for this crucial transitional period leading to australopithecines is still scanty and somewhat confusing.

However, by about 4. By 3 million years ago, they were common in both East and South Africa. Some have been found dating to this period in North Central Africa also. As the australopithecines evolved, they exploited more types of environments. Their early proto-hominin ancestors had been predominantly tropical forest animals. However, African forests were progressively giving way to sparse woodlands and dry grasslands, or savannas.

The australopithecines took advantage of these new conditions. In the more open environments, bipedalism would very likely have been an advantage. One line apparently was adapted primarily to the food resources in lake margin grassland environments and had an omnivorous diet that increasingly included meat. Among them were our early human ancestors who started to make stone tools by this time.

The other line seems to have lived more in mixed grassland and woodland environments, like the earlier australopithecines, and was primarily vegetarian. This second, more conservative line of early hominins died out by 1 million years ago or shortly before then. It is likely that all of the early hominins, including humans, supplemented their diets with protein and fat rich termites and ants just as some chimpanzees do today.

Major early hominin sites History of Discovery. In his book entitled The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex , Charles Darwin speculated that fossils of the earliest humans and their immediate progenitors ultimately would be found somewhere in Africa. He based this on the fact that the natural range of our nearest living relatives, chimpanzees and gorillas, is limited to Africa. He concluded that we ultimately must have shared a now extinct common ancestor with those apes in Africa.

This view was mostly rejected by the scientific world of the time. Before the 's, knowledge of our fossil ancestors only went back to the Neandertals in Europe and some presumably earlier human-like forms from Java, in Southeast Asia.

Few researchers were willing to estimate the time period of the earliest hominins at much more than , years, and there was no inkling of anything older from Africa. In addition, there was a bias among the predominantly European paleoanthropologists against accepting early Africans as the ancestors of all humanity. In , Raymond Dart , an Australian anatomy professor at the University of Witerwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, obtained a fossil skull that had been blasted out of a nearby limestone quarry at Taung.

It took him 73 days to chisel the skull free from its surrounding stone matrix and 4 years of spare time to free the jaw and the fossilized brain. However, long before then, Dart recognized the importance of this find. In he named it Australopithecus africanus literally "southern ape from Africa". Because of its small size, he called it the "Taung baby.

Despite its relatively small brain, he concluded that this species was intermediate between apes and humans. He based this mainly on the shape and position of the base of the brain cast.

It indicated that the foramen magnum , or hole in the skull through which the spinal cord passes, pointed downward and was nearly at the central balance point of the skull. In addition to Ardi, a possible direct ancestor, it is possible here to find hominid fossils from as recently as , years ago—an early Homo sapiens like us—all the way back to Ardipithecus kadabba , one of the earliest known hominids, who lived almost six million years ago. At last count, the Middle Awash project, which takes its name from this patch of the Afar desert and includes 70 scientists from 18 nations, has found specimens from seven different hominid species that lived here one after the other.

She is not the oldest member of the extended human family, but she is by far the most complete of the early hominids; most of her skull and teeth as well as extremely rare bones of her pelvis, hands, arms, legs and feet have so far been found. With sunlight beginning to bleach out the gray-and-beige terrain, we see a cloud of dust on the horizon.

Soon two new Toyota Land Cruisers pull up on the promontory, and a half-dozen Alisera men jump out wearing Kufi caps and cotton sarongs, a few cinched up with belts that also hold long, curved daggers.

After customary greetings and handshaking, White gets down on his hands and knees with a few fossil hunters to show the tribesmen how the researchers crawl on the ground, shoulder to shoulder, to look for fossils. The Alisera smile wanly, apparently amused that anyone would want to grovel on the ground for a living.

They grant permission to search for fossils—for now. But they add one caveat. Someday, they say, the researchers must teach them how to get history from the ground. The quest for fossils of human ancestors began in earnest after Charles Darwin proposed in , in his book The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex , that humans probably arose in Africa.

Others disagreed, arguing that Asian apes were closer to modern humans. As it happened, the first truly ancient remains of a hominid—a fossilized skullcap and teeth more than half a million years old—were found in Asia, on the island of Java, in So began a century of discovery notable for spectacular finds, in which the timeline of human prehistory began to take shape and the debate continued over whether Asia or Africa was the human birthplace.

In , the Australian anatomist Raymond Dart, looking through a crate of fossils from a limestone quarry in South Africa, discovered a small skull. The first early hominid from Africa, the Taung child, as it was known, was a juvenile member of Australopithecus africanus , a species that lived one million to two million years ago, though at the time skeptical scientists said the chimpanzee-size braincase was too small for a hominid. In , archaeologist Louis Leakey and his wife Mary, working in Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, discovered a bit of hominid jawbone that would later become known as Paranthropus boisei.

The 1. Their work inspired American and European researchers to sweep through the Great Rift Valley, a geologic fault that runs through Kenya, Tanzania and Ethiopia and exposes rock layers that are millions of years old. But her ankle, knee and pelvis showed that she walked upright like us. This meant Lucy was a hominid—only humans and our close relatives in the human family habitually walk upright on the ground.

A member of the species Australopithecus afarensis , which lived from 3. She confirmed that upright walking evolved long before hominids began using stone tools—about 2. But her upright posture and gait raised new questions. How long had it taken to evolve the anatomy to balance on two feet?