Forscher, die in Äthiopien arbeiten, haben Überreste eines bisher unbekannten Zweigs der Menschheit entdeckt. Die Fossilien, die vor 2,8 Millionen und 2,6 Millionen Jahren Zähne enthalten, gehören zu einem nie zuvor gesehenen Mitglied der Gattung Australopithecus. Die Ergebnisse wurden in Nature veröffentlicht.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-human-ancestor-identified-from-fossil-teeth/
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Stuff like this really shows how young paleontology is.
We’re still filling in the map of our own past.
For centuries, people would find fossilized shark teeth and have no clue what they were. They called them “glossopetrae” — tongue stones — and thought they were petrified dragon tongues that fell from the sky.
It wasn’t until the 1600s that Nicolaus Steno looked at one, compared it to a modern shark’s head, and basically said: “Guys… these are just shark teeth.”
That one “aha” moment pretty much launched paleontology as a science.
Every new discovery — even a single hominin tooth — is just us adding another sentence to the story Steno taught us how to read in stone.