Hominins — humans and their ancient relatives — emerged in Africa some seven million years ago. Now researchers have gleaned genetic information from an African hominin that lived two million years ago, the oldest such data yet recovered.
The protein sequences, described in a preprint posted on the bioRxiv server on 3 July1, come from several Paranthropus robustus tooth fossils found in a South African cave.
These genetic data are the oldest that have been collected from any hominin, pushing back the genetic record to times and places previously unthinkable, scientists say.
“It’s an amazing result,” says Katerina Douka, an archaeological scientist at the University of Vienna. At that age, the remains have “almost turned into stone”, she adds.
It is unclear whether the few sequences that can be recovered from very old fossils can help to untangle evolutionary relationships that scientists have debated over for decades. “Nobody really knows yet how useful this will be,” says Beatrice Demarchi, a biomolecular archaeologist at the University of Turin, Italy....
Building an evolutionary tree from genetic data of such old remains “can be considered a potentially transformative breakthrough for palaeoanthropology”, Cappellini and his colleagues write in the preprint. They add that ancient-protein studies could improve understanding of where creatures such as Australopithecus afarensis — of which there are many fossil fragments and the more complete specimen known as Lucy — sit in the hominin family tree.
Other scientists say that the jury is still out on whether ancient proteins will help bring consensus to the picture of hominin evolution, which is currently built largely from the shapes of bones.
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