New Fossils Challenge Line of Descent in Human Family Tree

摘要

Ever since the famous fossil hunter Louis Leakey found a skull of Homo habilis in Olduvai, Tanzania, in 1960, researchers have thought that this 2-million-year-old hominid was the first member of our own genus, Homo. This "handyman's" relatively big brain and association with flake tools eventually convinced many paleoanthropologists that H. habilis gave rise to H. erectus between 2 million and 1.6 million years ago, in a neat line of descent that led to modern humans.