A skull fragment from a cave near Johannesburg is helping push back the story of one of our closest relatives. Researchers say the fossil is the first adult Homo erectus found at South Africa’s Drimolen site, and it dates to about 2 million years ago.
That makes it roughly 200,000 years older than the adult Homo erectus fossils from Dmanisi, in the country of Georgia, which are about 1.8 million years old. The team, led by Jesse Martin of La Trobe University in Australia, published the work in the journal Annals of Human Biology.
What They Found
Drimolen sits in the Cradle of Humankind, a fossil-rich area of caves in South Africa. The main quarry was found in 1992 and dug until 2019. The new paper formally describes 18 hominin fossils from the site that had not been published before.
- The adult skull fragment, labeled DNH 127, joins an earlier Homo erectus find from the same site that belonged to a child roughly 2 to 4 years old.
- The other fossils belong to Paranthropus robustus, a big-toothed cousin of our genus with a brain only slightly larger than a chimpanzee’s.
- At Drimolen, Paranthropus outnumbered Homo erectus by more than 10 to 1, the researchers say.
Martin said the adult fossil offers “further confirmation that this species first appeared in southern Africa 2 million years ago.”
Two Species, Two Strategies
Comparing Drimolen with the younger Swartkrans site nearby, the team describes the two groups heading in different directions between about 2.0 and 1.8 million years ago. Paranthropus developed bigger teeth and stronger chewing muscles. Homo erectus developed a bigger brain and smaller molars, which the researchers suggest could be linked to eating more meat. The new fossils also support treating the Drimolen Paranthropus as its own subspecies, P. robustus ukusa.
The Catch
The release does not explain how the fossils were dated or how precise the dates are, and the “200,000 years older” comparison is specifically against the adult Dmanisi fossils. The claim that one species outnumbered the other is based on fossil counts, which may not reflect how many individuals actually lived there. The full paper is the place to check the methods.
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