![]() afarensis, the researchers, including ASU paleoanthropologist William Kimbel, scanned eight fossil crania from the Ethiopian sites of Dikika and Hadar using high-resolution conventional and synchrotron-computed tomography. To study brain growth and organization in A. The CT-scanning enabled the researchers to get at two long-standing questions that could not be answered by visual observation and measurement alone: Is there evidence for human-like brain reorganization in Australopithecus afarensis, and was the pattern of brain growth in this species more similar to that of chimpanzees or that of humans? The research reveals that while Lucy's species had an ape-like brain structure, the brain took longer to reach adult size, suggesting that infants may have had a longer dependence on caregivers, a human-like trait. platyops.A new study published in Science Advances used CT-scanning technology to view three-million-year old brain imprints inside fossil skulls of the species Australopithecus afarensis (famous for "Lucy" and "Selam" from Ethiopia's Afar region) to shed new light on the evolution of brain organization and growth. In April, researchers unearthed a 3.4-million-year-old hominid foot in Ethiopia that retained too many features related to climbing to be the foot of A. platyops‘ status as a species, it’s not the only evidence that more than one type of hominid lived in East Africa alongside Lucy. afarensis was the upright walker at Laetoli. The more popular theory, however, is that A. The footprints reveal that some sort of hominid with a modern gait was alive at the time. ![]() platyops made the famous footprints preserved at Laetoli in Tanzania. platyops as a distinct hominid, there’s not much to say about the species. There are some other fragments of teeth and skull from West Turkana that may belong to the species, but those fossils don’t really shed any further light on the issue.įor those who do accept K. Many scientists probably won’t be convinced unless more fossils matching K. platyops in its list of hominid species and categorizes the K. The Smithsonian Human Origins Program, for example, doesn’t include K. Of course, one paper never really settles a debate in human evolution. Thus, the fossil deserves to be in its own species, they concluded. platyops was significantly different from other hominid species, mainly in its flat face, forward-facing cheekbones and small molars (over time, the molars got bigger and bigger in the many species of Australopithecus before getting small again in the genus Homo). According to the researchers, the results confirmed that K. afarensis and six other extinct hominid species, in addition to modern humans, chimpanzees and gorillas. With that in mind, Spoor and the two Leakeys compared the physical features of K. Although the skull contains numerous cracks, the shape of the skull and teeth remain largely unaffected by the damage, the researchers reported in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. In their new analysis, the team used CT scans of the skull to assess how distorted the fossil really is. platyops-Fred Spoor of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and Meave Leakey of the Koobi Fora Research Project-worked with Koobi Fora’s Louise Leakey to reanalyze the skull. In 2010, some of the original describers of K. platyops skull is not actually a distinct species at all-it’s simply a distorted skull of an A. While some researchers take the species as a sign that there was a diversity of hominid types around during the middle Pliocene epoch, others say the K. platyops‘ identity and place in the human family tree. The skull’s finders decided it must be a new species, Kenyanthropus platyops.Īt the time, anthropologists disagreed over K. In 1999, researchers working in West Turkana, Kenya, uncovered a roughly 3.5-million-year-old hominid skull with a face too flat to belong to A. But Lucy’s species may not have been alone. Three and a half million years ago was the heyday of Australopithecus afarensis. The 3.5-million-year-old skull of Kenyanthropus platyops.
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