Monday, August 13, 2007

Ooops

Time to redraw humanity's evolutionary path

An international team of researchers say their new fossil discovery disproves the notion that over the last two million years ancestral humans followed a straight evolutionary trail from Homo habilis to Homo ergaster to Homo erectus and finally to us, Homo sapiens.

Instead, the team - including geochronologist Ian McDougall with the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra - wrote overnight in the journal Nature that H. habilis and H. erectus lived side-by-side in the same park of Kenya for nearly half-a-million years.
“Their co-existence makes it unlikely that Homo erectus evolved from Homo habilis,”
concluded author Maeve Leakey of Stony Brook University in New York State and co-director the Koobi Fora Research Project in Kenya.

adapted from an article appearing in The Australian by Leigh Dayton on August 09, 2007

'We were wrong all along!'

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