New Ancient Ancestors?

Skull KNM-WT-40000, Kenyanthropus platyops.

Louise and Meave Leaky

This photo of WT 40000 and ER 1470 is from Lieberman 2001.

Reconstruction of Kenyanthropus based on skull data.

This grapefruit-size Homo floresiensis skull is apparently from a 30-year-old female who lived 18,000 years ago on Flores, an island in Indonesia. The small brain suggests that the new human species is not a pygmy Homo sapiens but rather a descendant of Homo Erectus.

Scientist Peter Brown photographs the skull of Homo floresiensis, a species of human that is new to science.

Homo floresiensis alongside Homo sapiens. The new species of human's adult size was about that of a three-year-old modern-human child. The skull of H. floresienses was the size of a grapefruit.

A male Homo floresiensis returns from the hunt. Found on the island of Flores in Indonesia, these ancient humans grew no taller than a three-year-old modern-human child.

Childhood OriginsMeet the Dikika baby, a three-year-old from the dawn of humanity. Her discovery holds clues to the origin of childhood.

A scientist holds a skull named "Selam" of a fossil discovered in an area of Ethiopia called Dikika, September 20, 2006. A 3.3 million-year-old skeleton of the earliest child ever found shows the ancient ancestor of modern humans walked upright but may have also climbed trees, scientists said on Wednesday.

The Dikika child's flat nose and projecting face look chimp-like, but the Ethiopian fossil comes from a 3.3-million-year-old human ancestor that belongs to the same species as the famous Lucy skeleton.

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2006/11/dikika-baby/sloan-text

Manthi in a room full of skulls at the National Museum of Kenya

in Nairobi.

Frederick Kyalo Manthi , Phd, examines the H. erectus complete skull he discovered in 2000 near lake Turkana in Kenya, Wednesday, Aug. 8, 2007 at the National Museum of Kenya in Nairobi. Surprising fossils dug up in Africa are creating messy kinks in the iconic straight line of human evolution from knuckle-dragging ape to

briefcase-carrying man

Anthropologist Frederick Kyalo Manthi of the National Museum of Kenya holds a Homo erectus skull he found near Lake

Turkana in 2000.

The Homo erectus skull in side view.