A New Face in Human Evolution

March 21 -- A 3.5-million-year-old, flat-faced early human skull, which paleontologists found poking from the crumbling Kenyan earth, could push "Lucy" out of our ancestral family tree.

For 20 years, most scientists have agreed that Australopithecus afarensis, represented by the famous Lucy skeleton found in Ethiopia, is the direct ancestor of the many branches of hominids — upright walking human-like primates — including modern man.

But Meave Leakey and colleagues report in this week's journal Nature that the new species, named Kenyanthropus platyops, Greek for "flat-faced man of Kenya," lived at the same time as Lucy's species. And, they argue, modern humans can't be directly related to both. The finding casts sudden confusion over scientists' understanding of early humans and possibly adds a whole new main trunk to the human family tree.

"Kenyanthropus shows persuasively that at least two lineages [of early humans] existed as far back as 3.5 million years ago," says Leakey who is the daughter-in-law of Louis and Mary Leakey and wife of Richard Leakey, famous paleontologists who made several significant hominid finds in the last 50 years. "The early stages of human evolution are more complex than we previously thought."

Scientists say Lucy and the flat-faced man are too different physically to be closely related. To accommodate the new, unusual find, Leakey created a new genus to include the specimen.

"The shock that this find will give the human evolution community is on the same scale as the Lucy find," says Fred Spoor, professor of evolutionary anatomy at University College London and an author of the article describing the new species. "What people immediately want to know is, can you tell whether we came from one or the other? And the answer right now is no."

Sharp Eyes Spy Tooth

Patrick Gathogo, a Kenyan currently studying geology at the University of Utah, remembers walking behind Leakey, leader of the expedition, during the summer of 1999 when the skull was found near Lake Turkana. The region has been one of the most fertile areas in the world for hominid fossil finds.