I guess we’ve been around longer than we thought. A new study has found how mankind arose in the Eastern Mediterranean some 7 Million years ago.
Shown here is an artist’s reconstruction of Graecopithecus freybergi, to the left, and the jawbone and tooth found in Bulgaria and Greece respectively to the right. Image Credit: University of Toronto.
Ancient skeletal remains suggest that our lineage separated from that of chimpanzees in the Mediterranean and not in Africa, according to controversial research.
A team of Canadian and European scientists has propelled a controversial hypothesis about the origins of humanity that DESTROYS an essential part of what we thought we knew so far.
Most of the scientific community considers that the lineage of chimpanzees, which are our closest living relatives, and ours diverged around five and seven million years ago somewhere in Africa, where our direct ancestors came into existence.
However, according to two articles published in the journal PLoS ONE, that this separation occurred several hundred thousand years earlier scientists thought and, what is even more surprising, it did not happen on the African mainland, but in the Mediterranean, drastically altering the origins of mankind like no other discovery before.
The evidence is two known fossils of a rare hominid named Graecopithecus freybergi, a lower jaw found in Greece and a superior premolar in Bulgaria, which, according to the authors of the study, belonged to a very ancient hominin that walked on Earth more than 7 million years ago.
The international team of scientists was led by Madelaine Böhme of the University of Tübingen, and Nikolai Spassov of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.
Scientists used computerized tomography to examine the jaw discovered in 1944 at Pyrgos Vassilissis near Athens and came to the revolutionary conclusion that Europe, and not Africa is where mankind was “created.”
Pictured here is the lower jaw of the 7.2-million-year-old Graecopithecus freybergi (El Graeco) found near Pyrgos Vassilissis, Greece. Image Credit: Wolfgang Gerber, University of Tübingen
“Even though great apes typically have two or three separate and diverging roots, we have found that the roots of Graecopithecus converge and are partially fused – a feature that is characteristic of modern humans, early humans and several pre-humans including Ardipithecus and Australopithecus,“ said Madelaine Böhme.
“No other fossil and living non-human primate is known with such roots,” Spassov said, indicating how the analysis of El Graeco’s environment discovered that it was a savannah when this individual was alive, millions of years ago.
The lower jaw, nicknamed ” El Greco ” by scientists, has other characteristics that suggest that the species graecopithecus freybergi could belong to the prehuman lineage.
“We were surprised by our results since so far only pre-humans were known in sub-Saharan Africa,” says Jochen Fuss, a Tübingen researcher who carried out this part of the study.
Furthermore, experts suggest that Graecopithecus is SEVERAL hundred thousand years older than the oldest potential pre-human in Africa, the six to seven million-year-old Sahelanthropus from Chad.
The species is the only prehuman known in Europe, and its possible ancestor could be Ouranopithecus, about 9 million years old, native to Greece.
(H/T Science Daily)
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