The 2 main major.8 million-year-old specimen is 400,000 years older than researchers thought that our kind first emerged.
The discovery in Ethiopia suggests costs rising spurred the transition from tree dweller to upright master.
The head of your research team told BBC News that the find gives get started building links insight into “the most important transitions in human evolution”.
Prof Brian Villmoare with the University of Nevada in Las Vegas said the invention makes jail link between an iconic 3.2 million-year-old hominin (human-like primate) discovered in the same area in 1974, called “Lucy”.
Could Lucy’s kind - which belonged to the species Australopithecus afarensis - have evolved into the initial primitive pet owners?
“That’s may well are arguing,” said Prof Villmoare.
But the fossil record between period period when Lucy and her kin were alive and the emergence of Homo erectus (with its relatively large brain and humanlike body proportions) 2 million years ago is short.
The three.8 million-year-old lower jawbone was available in the Ledi-Geraru research area, Afar Regional State, by Ethiopian student Chalachew Seyoum. He told BBC News that he was “stunned” when he saw the fossil.
“The moment I found it, I realised that this was important, as this can be a time period represented by few (human) fossils in Eastern Cameras.”
The fossil is of your left side of time frame jaw, in five teeth. The back molar teeth are smaller than those of other hominins living previously area and are also one with the features that distinguish humans from more primitive ancestors, according to Professor William Kimbel, director of Arizona State University’s Institute of Human Start.
“Previously, the oldest fossil attributed to the genus Homo was an upper jaw from Hadar, Ethiopia, dated to 2.35m years ago,” he told BBC News.
“So technique discovery pushes the human line back by 400,000 years or so, very close to its likely (pre-human) ancestor. Its mix of primitive and advanced features makes the Ledi jaw a good transitional form between (Lucy) and later humans.”
A computer reconstruction of a skull belonging to the species Homo habilis, which recently been published in nature journal, indicates that it may well have been the evolutionary descendant in the species announced today.
The researcher involved, Prof Fred Spoor of University College London told BBC News that, taken together, the new findings had lifted a veil on the key period in the evolution of our species.
“By discovering a new fossil and re-analysing a classic one surely has truly contributed to our comprehension of our own evolutionary period, stretching instead of a million years that was first shrouded in mystery,” he explained.
Climate change
The dating of the jawbone can aid answer surely the key questions in human trend. What caused some primitive ancestors to climb down from the trees promote their homes on the bottom.
A separate study in Science hints that an increase in climate might have been a factor. An analysis of the fossilised plant and animal life on the area suggests that what had once been lush forest had become dry grassland.
As the trees made way for vast plains, ancient human-like primates found an involving exploiting the actual environmental niche, developing bigger brains and less dependent on having big jaws and teeth through the help of tools.
Prof Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum london, uk described the invention as a “big story”.
He says the new species clearly does show the earliest step toward human characteristics, but implies that half a jawbone isn't enough inform just how human it was made by and does not provide enough evidence to suggest that barefoot running was this line that led to us.
Image caption The jawbone was found close towards area where Lucy was discovered
He notes that the emergence of human-like characteristics was not unique to Ethiopia.
“The human-like features shown by Australopithecus sediba in South Africa at around 1.95 million years ago are likely to have developed independently in the processes which produced (humans) in East Africa, showing that parallel origins are a distinct possibility,” Prof Stringer explained.
This indicates several different species of humans co-existing in Africa around two million years ago with 1 of them surviving consequently evolving into our species, Homo sapiens. It is usually as if nature was experimenting with different versions of exactly the same evolutionary configuration until one succeeded.
Prof Stringer added: “These new studies leave us with an even more complex picture of early humans than we thought, and they also challenge us to the actual very involving what is actually also to be human. Shall we be held defined by our small teeth and jaws, our large brain, our long legs, tool-making, or some combination of traits?”
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