Fossil find pushes human-ape split back millions of

years

Ten million-year-old fossils discovered in Ethiopia show that humans and apes probably
split six or seven million years earlier than widely thought, according to landmark study
released Wednesday.

The handful of teeth from the earliest direct ancestors of modern gorillas ever found --
one canine and eight molars -- also leave virtually no doubt, the study's authors and
experts said, that both humans and modern apes did indeed originate from Africa.

The near total absence to date of traces on the continent of apes from this period had
led many scientists to conclude that the shared line from which humans and living great
apes emerged had taken a long evolutionary detour through Eurasia.

But the study, published in the British journal Nature, "conclusively demonstrates that
the Last Common Ancestor (of both man and ape) was strictly an African phenomenon,"
commented paleoanthropologist Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University in Ohio.

Lovejoy described the fossils as "a critically important discovery," a view echoed by
several other scientists who had read the paper or seen the artifacts.

"This is a major breakthrough in our understanding of the origin of humanity," Yohannes

Haile-Selassie, a physical anthropologist at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History,
told AFP.

The most startling implication of the find, the scientists agree, is that our human
progenitors diverged from today's great apes -- including gorillas, orangutans and
chimpanzees -- several million years earlier than widely accepted research based on
molecular genetics had previously asserted.

The trail in the hunt for physical evidence of our human ancestors goes cold some six or
seven million years ago.

Orrorin -- discovered in Kenya in 2000 and nicknamed "Millennium Man" although its sex
remains unknown -- goes back 5.8 to 6.1 million years, while Sahelanthropus, found a
year later in Chad, is considered by most experts to extend the human family tree
another one million years into the past.

Beyond that, however, fossils of early humans from the Miocene period, 23 to five million
years ago, disappear. Fossils of early apes especially during the critical period of 14 to
eight million years ago were virtually non-existant -- until now.

"We know nothing about how the human line actually emerged from apes," the authors
of the paper noted.

But the new fossils, dubbed "Chororapithecus abyssinicus" by the team of Japanese and
Ethiopian paleoanthropologists who found them, place the early ancestors of the modern
day gorilla 10 to 10.5 million years in the past, suggesting that the human-ape split
occurred before that.

There is broad agreement that chimpanzees were the last of the great apes to split from
the evolutionary line leading to man, after gorillas and, even earlier, orangutans.

Conventional scientific wisdom, based on genetic "distances" measured by molecular

geneticists, had placed the divergence between chimps and humans some five to six
million years ago. Orangutans are thought to have parted company with our ancestors
13 to 14 million years ago.

"If the new discovery is in the gorilla lineage, then this will definitely substantially push
back the split time between apes and humans," Halie-Selassie at Kent State told AFP.

The scientists leading the team that found the fossils -- Gen Suwa of the University of
Tokyo, and Ethiopian paleontologists Berhane Asfaw and Yonas Beyene -- calculated
that the human-orangutan split "could easily have been as old as 20 million years."

They determined that the teeth belonged to gorilla ancestors based on unique shared
characteristics of the molars, which had evolved for a diet of fibrous foods such as stems
and leaves.

The match is not exact, however, and could prompt some scientists to challenge the
findings.

The teeth fragments, found in barren scrubland some 170 kilometres (100 miles) east of
Ethiopia's capital Addis Ababa, almost went unnoticed.

Asfaw recalled the chance discovery.

"It was our last day of field survey in February 2006, and our sharp-eyed field assistant,
Kampiro, found the first ape tooth, a canine," he said.

"He picked it up and showed it to me, and I knew that this was something new --
Ethiopia's first fossil great ape."