So far, it was looking like a paleoanthropologist’s dream scenario. By this time, the hominid lineage had forked into two branches. One branch of the genus Australopithecus developed specializations for eating tough tubers and other hard foods—huge jaw muscles and massive back teeth. The other branch—hominids with increasingly smaller back teeth, more lightly built, long-legged bodies, and increasingly larger brains—led to us. Bigger brains are useful, of course, but they are also expensive to run. They require high-calorie foods—the kind you get by, say, scavenging the kills of lions and smashing up the bones for their marrow. All that was missing at Hata was a skull that would fit the bill: not as big-brained as H. erectus but clearly headed in that direction. Sure enough, in the very next field season team member Yohannes Haile-Selassie, now head of physical anthropology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, discovered the first piece of a hominid skull. But it was hardly what the dream scenario predicted.Now, while the rest of the group walked up a gully scanning for fossils, Berhane Asfaw and I headed down onto the flat plain to the spot where the skull had been found. Piles of excavated sediment paid testimony to the seven weeks of hard labor it took to remove the fragments. Once it was assembled, the skull did turn out to have some Homo-like traits, particularly in the size of the front teeth. But the molars and premolars were huge. And at 450 cubic centimeters, its cranium was no bigger than that of a typical Australopithecus. This was not a creature in command of its environment like H. erectus. This was a clever, two-legged primate eking out a furtive existence among larger, faster predators and avoiding their jaws long enough to pass its ripening intelligence on to the next generation.The team chose for it the name Australopithecus garhi; garhi means surprise in the Afar language. Au. garhi was certainly in the right place and time to be the immediate ancestor to Homo. Whether it is, however, remains to be seen.This mystery will be solved soon, said Asfaw as we hiked back to the cars for the ride to camp And it will be solved in the Middle Awash.
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