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