Stunning ancient skull shakes up human family tree.

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A skull (left) shows thatAustralopithecus anamensis(artist's reconstruction, right) had a small brain and a protruding face.(Left to right): JENNIFER TAYLOR/CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY/DALE MORI AND LIZ RUSSELL; JOHN GURCHE AND MATT CROW/CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY
▼ For months, herder Ali Bereino had been trying to get a job working for a team of fossil hunters in northeastern Ethiopia. The Afar man hung around, watching and learning. One day in February 2016, Bereino dug a burrow to keep his baby goats safe from hyenas. He noticed teeth protruding from the hard-packed sand and pulled out a jawbone, which he brought to the team's leader, Ethiopian paleoanthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassie of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in Ohio. Shoveling aside nearly half a meter of old goat droppings and sieving through sediment, the team unearthed the nearly complete skull of an enigmatic human ancestor, the oldest member of the genus that eventually led to our own.
After 3 years of analysis, researchers have dated the fossilto 3.8 million years old and identified itasAustralopithecus anamensis, a hominin long thought to be the direct predecessor of the famed "Lucy" species,A. afarensis. The new fossil could reshuffle that ancient relationship, the authors argue this week in two papers inNature.
Researchers hail the skull as one of the most significant hominin discoveries in decades. "It's a spectacular find," says Carol Ward, an evolutionary anatomist at the University of Missouri School of Medicine in Columbia. "A number of teams—mine included—have been looking for an australopith skull like this. … This is the specimen we've been waiting for."
Still, not everyone is convinced it clarifies the relations of the australopithecines, a genus of upright apes that lived between 4.2 million and 2 million years ago throughout eastern and southern Africa.
A. anamensiswas first identified in 1995, mostly on the basis of 4-million-year-old teeth and jaws from Kenya. Given the dates, plus several telltale anatomical similarities, most researchers concluded thatA. anamensisgradually transitioned into and was replaced byA. afarensis, which lived from about 3.7 million to 3 million years ago.
The new Ethiopian specimen, named MRD after Miro Dora, the site where it was found, was probably a male with (▪ ▪ ▪)

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