«All descend from a single species" - Corriere della Sera

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the hominid of Dmanisi, Georgia

“all descend from a single species”
So too is the human family tree

Found in Georgia a hominid with features never before seen together in the fossil of an ancestor

Into The hominid discovered in Georgia (AP)

Into The Family Tree of Man could be revised, rewritten even after the discovery of the remains of the hominid from Dmanisi, Georgia, in which we are recognized as a “collage”, different features never before seen together in the fossil record of one of our ancestors.

L? Dmanisi hominid

If until now it was thought that after the divergence from the Australopithecus and the appearance of the genus Homo (about 2.5 million years ago), they had succeeded many different species, all extinct except for Homo sapiens, now you realize that it is in this way that should be read in the fossil record: in reality there would be a single species in the early stages of the evolution of man. Even if “further studies are needed to confirm the hypothesis, based on our discovery beyond what was previously were considered different species groups were otherwise morphologically similar,” write the paleontologists of the Georgian National Museum in Tbilisi, authors of the discovery.

Before the discovery of the hominid from Dmanisi it was thought that the oldest species of the genus Homo was Homo Rudolfensis, who lived between 2.4 and 1.9 million years ago. The next would be the species Homo habilis would evolve from Homo ergaster, appeared about 1.8 million years ago. Descending from Homo ergaster would have been Homo erectus, soon spread to a Eurasia. Contemporary in the final stages of Homo erectus would have been (in Europe) Homo heidelbergensis, which are descended from Neanderthals, who lived between 300,000 and 30 million years ago in Europe, Middle East and western Asia. The anatomically modern humans, or Homo sapiens, appeared instead in Africa around 200,000 years ago and 40,000 years ago has made its entry into Europe.

But now the discovery of a new hominid sweeps away this complex `bush ‘family tree. “In light of new discoveries – says paleontologist Lorenzo Rook, University of Florence – it seems that all the morphological differences noted in these hominids would actually be evidence of normal biological variability within of a single species, due to environmental adaptations or simple genetic variability. ” They are just the remains of the five individuals discovered in Dmanisi site, he adds, is an example (exceptional and unique in the fossil record) of a small sample of the same population with a high variability. “Although not all experts agree with this new hypothesis, and some people even thought that the same site of Dmanisi fossils of different species there are, the discovery – said Rook – impels us to change the way in which has been interpreted human evolution so far » (Ansa)