Researchers in Ethiopia recently made a significant discovery, having unearthed fossilized teeth from an ancient human species that was previously unknown in the evolutionary history of humans.

The story of human evolution is not a simple ladder from early forms to more advanced ones. For decades, fossils shaped a picture of steady, linear progress – one form giving rise to another in a neat sequence.

Ancient, fossilized teeth, uncovered during a decades-long archaeology project in northeastern Ethiopia, indicate that two different kinds of hominins, or human ancestors, lived in the same place between 2.6 million and 2.8 million years ago — and one of them may be a previously unknown species.

The discovery of thirteen teeth dating back 2.6 to 2.8 million years confirms that Homo and an enigmatic Australopithecus coexisted in Ethiopia, revealing a more complex human evolution.

The research team discovered 13 teeth in sediments dating back to 2.6 to 2.8 million years ago. Tooth fossils discovered in Ethiopia introduced a new Australopithecus species to the scientific world.

This was announced in a study published in Nature, in which an international team of researchers describes the discovery in the Afar region of Ethiopia of 13 fossilized teeth between 2.8 and 2.6 million years old, which could belong to a previously unidentified species of Australopithecus that coexisted with early humans.

A new study in Nature described 13 fossilized teeth from Ethiopia’s Ledi-Geraru site that belonged to both a primitive Homo and an unknown species of Australopithecus. The paper detailed teeth dated between 2.8 and 2.6 million years ago and added evidence that at least two early hominin lineages coexisted in the same region around 2.6 million years ago.

Scientists in Ethiopia unearthed pieces of 2.65 million-year-old fossilized teeth belonging to two members of a newly discovered Homo species that could challenge previously accepted understandings of human evolution.

Researchers have unearthed tooth fossils in Ethiopia dating to about 2.65 million years ago of a previously unknown species in the human evolutionary lineage, one that lived in the same time and place as the earliest-known member of the genus Homo to which our own species belongs.

New hominin fossils recovered from the Ledi-Geraru Research Project area in the Afar region of Ethiopia suggest the presence of early Homo at 2.78 and 2.59 million years ago and a previously unknown species of Australopithecus at 2.63 million years ago.

Fossilized teeth discovered in Ethiopia have revealed a new-to-science species of Australopithecus, a genus of early hominins that lived from the Pliocene to the Early Pleistocene. Not only does it add to our busy human family tree, but the discovery proves they were living alongside the oldest specimens of Homo, the genus of early humans that includes our species, Homo sapiens.

The human family tree is looking more and more like an unruly bush. Paleontologists have now uncovered the teeth of two different ancient human lineages at the same site in northeastern Ethiopia. The discovery collapses the distance between the first of our genus and the last of the australopithecines in eastern Africa.