Australopithecus anamensis
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Australopithecus anamensis Temporal range: Pliocene |
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| Fossils | |
| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Mammalia |
| Order: | Primates |
| Family: | Hominidae |
| Subfamily: | Homininae |
| Genus: | Australopithecus or Praeanthropus |
| Species: | A. anamensis or P. anamensis |
| Binomial name | |
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Australopithecus anamensis M.G. Leakey et al., 1995 |
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Australopithecus anamensis (or Praeanthropus anamensis) is a stem-human species that lived approximately four million years ago. Nearly one hundred fossil specimens are known from Kenya and Ethiopia, representing over 20 individuals. It is accepted that A. anamensis is ancestral to A. afarensis and continued an evolving lineage. Fossil evidence determines that the Australopithecus anamensis is the earliest hominin species in the Turkana Basin. Due to an inability to retrieve a massive collection of fossils researchers are not able to make enough observations to differentiate a lot of the early hominids.
The first fossilized specimen of the species, though not recognized as such at the time, was a single fragment of humerus (arm bone) found in Pliocene strata in the Kanapoi region of West Lake Turkana by a Harvard University research team in 1965. The specimen was tentatively assigned at the time to Australopithecus and dated about four million years old. One method used to determine the age of the Kanapoi fossils was based on faunal correlation data, which, established a range between 4.0 and 4.5 mya. Little additional information was uncovered until 1987, when Canadian archaeologist Allan Morton (with Harvard University's Koobi Fora Field School) discovered fragments of a specimen protruding from a partially eroded hillside east of Allia Bay, near Lake Turkana, Kenya.
In 1994, the London-born Kenyan paleoanthropologist Meave Leakey and archaeologist Alan Walker excavated the Allia Bay site and uncovered several additional fragments of the hominid, including one complete lower jaw bone which closely resembles that of a common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) but whose teeth bear a greater resemblance to those of a human. Based on the limited postcranial evidence available, A. anamensis appears to have been habitually bipedal, although it retained some primitive features of its upper limbs.
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Wikipedia