A new ancestor of Homo sapiens has been named by scientists as part of an effort to clean up our ancestry.
Homo bodoensis is named for a skull discovered in Bodo D’Ar, Ethiopia in the 1970s, and is thought to date back to the Chibanian Age 600,000 years ago. A new paper proposes this is a new hominid species that is a direct ancestor of Homo sapiens, replacing two other species that the authors consider to be poorly defined.
However, Professor Chris Stringer, the Research Leader in human evolution at the Museum and who was not involved in the study, believes that the paper may not end the issues it aims to solve.
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“Regarding Homo bodoensis as the Chibanian ancestor of the Homo sapiens lineage has its problems,” he says, “as my and other research suggests that the facial shape of the Bodo skull is derived away from the ancestor of Homo sapiens, which was probably more like that of another relative, Homo antecessor.
“One of the authors of this paper has also just published another paper suggesting that a fossil from Hualongdong in China is also a Chibanian ancestor for Homo sapiens, which may well add further to the muddle!”
