ÐÔÊӽ紫ý

Each year during Hispanic Heritage Month, huge celebrations can be expected across the U.S. to showcase the diversity and culture of Hispanic people. This year, the Trump administration’s immigration crackdowns, a federally led English-only initiative and an anti-diversity, equity and inclusion push have changed the national climate in which these celebrations occur. Organizers across the country, from Massachusetts and North Carolina to California and Washington state, have postponed or canceled heritage month festivals altogether.

When Karen Harry first saw the artifacts, she snorted and shook her head. She simply did not believe that they were ancient cooking pots—everything about them looked wrong. Harry, a ceramics archaeologist at the ÐÔÊӽ紫ý, works mostly in the desert Southwest of the United States, where Native Americans traditionally made some of the most elegant pottery in the world. But one day in 2003, a colleague at ÐÔÊӽ紫ý, Liam Frink, returned from a trip to western Alaska, where he had been excavating sites associated with the Thule people, the ancestors of the modern-day Inuit. Frink showed her the remains of some supposed cooking pots he had collected there. The pieces looked more like chunks of scorched dirt than typical potsherds—blackened and crumbling, like nothing Harry had ever seen.

In mid-August, the science journal Nature published ÐÔÊӽ紫ý research about a newly discovered species of human ancestors. A group of scientists traveled to Ethiopia, where they found 13 teeth fossils. Some of them belonged to the genus Homo — yes, the same genus modern humans belong to. But they also found a set of teeth that belonged to a new species of the genus Australopithecus, indicating that both species were present in Africa at the same time a little over 2 million years ago. 

The appearance of the genus Homo is close to the Plio-Pleistocene boundary, reflected by fossils reported recently by Brian Villmoare and his colleagues and well dated at about 2.8 million years ago. The origin of Homo may relate to changes in temperature and associated changes in habitat, as recognised five decades ago by South African palaeontologists Elisabeth Vrba and Bob Brain, although they emphasised a date of 2.5 million years ago.

Researchers have discovered a new species of human ancestor that existed alongside Homo sapiens.

We were never alone, until recently at least. Just as there are multiple giraffe species in Africa, there were multiple human species, and some overlapped in time and space.

Researchers say recently discovered teeth come from a previously undiscovered species of Australopithecus, adding to our understanding of human evolution.

The famed Australopithecus Lucy may have a cousin. A new discovery of fossilized teeth in an Ethiopian field has researchers theorizing that they came from a new species of Australopithecus. They dated the teeth to the same period as the oldest known specimens of the genus Homo, found in the same field, upending some traditional theories of human evolution.

Researchers in Ethiopia recently made a significant discovery, having unearthed fossilized teeth from an ancient human species that was previously unknown in the evolutionary history of humans.

The story of human evolution is not a simple ladder from early forms to more advanced ones. For decades, fossils shaped a picture of steady, linear progress – one form giving rise to another in a neat sequence.

Ancient, fossilized teeth, uncovered during a decades-long archaeology project in northeastern Ethiopia, indicate that two different kinds of hominins, or human ancestors, lived in the same place between 2.6 million and 2.8 million years ago — and one of them may be a previously unknown species.

The discovery of thirteen teeth dating back 2.6 to 2.8 million years confirms that Homo and an enigmatic Australopithecus coexisted in Ethiopia, revealing a more complex human evolution.