Two dental experts explain that these furthest-back molars may be a not-so-necessary leftover from early human evolution.
Three upright walkers, including Lucy (center) and two specimens of Australopithecus sediba, a human ancestor from South Africa dating back nearly 2 million years.
Image compiled by Peter Schmid and courtesy of Lee R. Berger/Wikimedia Commons
Walking has taken a very long time to develop, with evidence of bipedalism among early humans in Africa roughly 4.4 million years ago.
The original Dikika child skull (left), a 3D model produced with synchrotron scanning (middle), and a model corrected for distortion during fossilisation (right).
Gunz et al. (2020) / Science Advances.
Recent research suggests that humankind’s origins lay outside of Africa. This is the nature of science: a paradigm that cannot be questioned on a regular basis becomes a dogma.
Upper teeth of a Neanderthal who lived about 40,000 years ago.
Debbie Guatelli-Steinberg
Anthropologists gather clues about how our ancient ancestors lived from their teeth. What will future anthropologists make of us based on the fossilized pearly whites we’ll leave behind?
The skull of Homo naledi is built like those of early Homo species but its brain was just more than half the size of the average ancestor from 2 million years ago.
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