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Multiple hominin genera were present in South Africa two million years ago

New fossils indicate that Homo erectus existed earlier than previously thought, at a time when also Australopithecus and Paranthropus were around close-by

In a new paper published in Science this week, an international team of scientists including a researcher from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig described, dated and contextualized new hominin fossils from Drimolen Main Quarry in South Africa. A two-million-year-old partial neurocranium shows that Homo erectus existed 100,000 to 200,000 years earlier than thought and shared the landscape in this region of South Africa with two other types of hominins – Australopithecus sediba and Paranthropus robustus.

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