The university is Southern Cross University.
An international collaboration has identified the earliest humans through the analysis of fossil teeth.
A new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that a maximum of seven of the 23 early Homo from southern Africa are actually Homo.
Our understanding of human evolution will be affected by these results.
The equipment used to detect lactation behavior was located at Southern Cross University.
The origins and biogeographic diversity of the earliest members of Homo are important topics in paleoanthropology.
The results show how important it is to identify the taxon of a fossil. If a misattribution was made to the genus Homo, it would bias interpretations of paleobiological aspects, like for example diet, ecological interactions and hominin paleodiversity.
Understanding when, where, and how the Homo species emerged on the African continent is important. There is no consensual definition of the genera Homo, which leads to endless debates about the identification of early Homo.
There are several sites in southern Africa where early Homo remains were found. Some of these fossils were thought to be representing two different species. The uncertainties preclude any reliable assessment of hominin paleodiversity, as well as the evolutionary relationships between Homo, Australopitheca and Paranthropus, eventually obscuring conditions of emergence of Homo.
The revision of the southern African Early Pleistocene dental remains was part of an international team of researchers.
The internal structure of the teeth has been shown to be a reliable proxy to distinguish hominids up to the sub-species level.
Professor Matthew Skinner from the University of Kent said that it was exciting when new techniques, such as microtomography, allowed them to extract new and valuable information from fossils that have been in our collections for decades.
Only four of the purported Homo specimen are considered to be Homo, and three others are preserving more primitive features.
The other specimen are more likely to be from the hominid family.
This study shows that the mandible SK 15 is more likely related to Paranthropus than it is to Homo erectus.
A larger paleodiversity of hominins than previously accepted was revealed by the analyses of the enamel-dentine junction shape.
Two purported early Homos from southern Africa were analyzed and mapped. The results of the geometric morphometric analyses show that both of them are more likely to be an example of the hominids.
There is a difference between what we know about Homo and what we know about Australopithecus.
The evolution behavior of early hominin, which has been advanced as a versatile adaptive trait to survive challenging ecological niches, could be one of the key features distinguishing Homo from the other hominins.
The three genera are confused because they were all living in the same area.
He believes thatAustralopithecus is the progenitor of both Homo and Paranthropus.
There are some important changes that happen with Homo that make us so successful that we evolved to over- compete and overtake all the other species.
It must be something in the behavior of Homo that allowed the earliest humans to move forward.
More information: Clément Zanolli et al, Dental data challenge the ubiquitous presence of Homo in the Cradle of Humankind, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2022). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2111212119 Journal information: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Provided by Southern Cross University
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