The Koobi Fora Research Project, an international group of scientists directed by mother-daughter team Meave and Louise Leakey and affiliated with the National Museums of Kenya, discovered 2 new fossils near Ileret, east of Lake Turkana, Kenya.

The first specimen is 1.55 million years old well-preserved skull. It is a similar size to the smaller Homo habilis, but shows most of the hallmarks of being Homo erectus. The second specimen consists of fragments of upper jaw and is dated to 100,000 years later at 1.44 million years old. It has the dental characteristics of Homo habilis.

Scientists who dated and analyzed the specimens said their findings challenged the conventional view that these species evolved one after the other. Instead, they apparently lived side by side in eastern Africa for almost half a million years.

Meave Leakey explains: “Their co-existence makes it unlikely that Homo erectus evolved from Homo habilis. The fact that they stayed separate as individual species for a long time suggests that they had their own ecological niche, thus avoiding direct competition”.

If this interpretation is correct, the early evolution of the genus Homo is left even more shrouded in mystery than before. It means that both habilis and erectus must have originated from a common ancestor between two million and three million years ago, a time when fossil hunters had drawn a virtual blank.