By Bruce Bower
Newly discovered face and jaw fossils show that at least two species of the human genus Homo lived alongside each other in East Africa nearly 2 million years ago.
These new finds are a good match for a roughly 2 million-year-old Homo brain case and face excavated in 1972 in the same part of East Africa, reports a team led by anthropologist Meave Leakey of the Turkana Basin Institute in Nairobi, Kenya. Long considered a puzzling exception among early Homo finds, the 1972 discovery features big bones and a flat, upright face and represents a species apart, Leakey and her colleagues conclude in the Aug. 9 Nature.
Until now, researchers have found it difficult to exclude the possibility that the large-faced fossil — known as KNM-ER 1470 — came from a male of the same species as smaller, early Homo finds in East Africa.