The discovery of a fossil in northern Ethiopia, attributed to the genus Paranthropus, has changed our understanding of this unusual branch of our early ancestors. Paranthropus is popularly known as ‘Nutcracker Man’. Its fossils date from 1.4 to 2.8 million years ago and have previously been found in parts of southern and eastern Africa. Now, a paper published in the journal Nature reports on the first discovery of Paranthropus in the Afar region, 1000 km further north than its previously known occurrence. The fossil, a partial lower jaw labelled MLP-3000, was found in the Mille-Logya research area by a team led by Zeresenay Alemseged of the University of Chicago. He subsequently studied the fossil jointly with Fred Spoor of the Natural History Museum in London and the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.