Homo Habilus and Homo Erectus co-existed for a long time

Human family tree redrawn

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The path of evolution isn't the straight line once imagined, fossil study suggests

Seth Borenstein, Associated Press

WASHINGTON–Surprising fossils dug up in Africa are creating messy kinks in the iconic straight line of human evolution with its knuckle-dragging ape and briefcase-carrying man.

The new research by famed paleontologist Meave Leakey in Kenya shows our family tree is more like a wayward bush with stubby branches, calling into question the evolution of our ancestors.

The old theory was that the first and oldest species in our family tree, Homo habilis, evolved into Homo erectus, which then became us, Homo sapiens. But those two earlier species lived side by side about 1.5 million years ago in parts of Kenya for at least half a million years, Leakey and colleagues report in a paper published in today's journal Nature.

In 2000, Leakey found an old Homo erectus complete skull within walking distance of an upper jaw of the Homo habilis, and both dated from the same general time period. That makes it unlikely that one evolved from the other, researchers said.

It's the equivalent of finding that your grandmother and great-grandmother were sisters rather than mother-daughter, said study co-author Fred Spoor, a professor of evolutionary anatomy at the University College in London.

The two species lived near each other, but probably didn't interact with each other, each having their own "ecological niche," Spoor said. Homo habilis was likely more vegetarian and Homo erectus ate some meat, he said.

Like chimps and apes, "they'd just avoid each other, they don't feel comfortable in each other's company," he said.

They have some still-undiscovered common ancestor that probably lived two million to three million years ago, a time that has not left much fossil record, Spoor said.

Overall, what it paints for human evolution is a "chaotic kind of looking evolutionary tree rather than this heroic march that you see with the cartoons of an early ancestor evolving into some intermediate and eventually unto us," Spoor said in a phone interview from a field office of the Koobi Fora Research Project in northern Kenya.

That old evolutionary cartoon, while popular with the general public, keeps getting proven wrong and too simple, said Bill Kimbel, who praised the latest findings. He is science director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University and wasn't involved in the research team.

"The more we know, the more complex the story gets," he said. Scientists used to think Homo sapiens evolved from Neanderthals, he said, but now know that both species lived during the same time period and that we did not come from Neanderthals.

Now a similar discovery applies further back in time.

Leakey's team – which included scientist Frederick Manthi, who posed for pictures with the fossils yesterday in Kenya – spent seven years analyzing the fossils before announcing their findings that it was time to redraw the family tree and rethink other ideas about human evolutionary history, especially about our most immediate ancestor, Homo erectus.

Because the Homo erectus skull Leakey recovered was much smaller than others, scientists had to first prove that it was erectus and not another species nor a genetic freak. The jaw, probably from an 18- or 19-year-old female, was adult and showed no signs of any type of malformations or genetic mutations, Spoor said. The scientists also know it isn't Homo habilis from several distinct features on the jaw.

That caused researchers to re-examine the 30 other erectus skulls they have and the dozens of partial fossils. They realized that the females of that species are much smaller than the males – something different from modern man, but similar to other animals, said study co-author Susan Anton, a New York University anthropologist.

Scientists hadn't looked carefully enough before to see that there was a distinct difference in males and females.