Sirens ring out. The spacecraft crashes
into the planet and the engine slowly
wors into silence. You undo your harness
and fall out of the vessel. And then you
realize you are not alone.
You are surrounded by strangelooking
creatures shorter than you are with arms
longer than their legs. In some ways
they are familiar, reminding you of
humans. But their stockiness and the
monstrous shape of their heads quickly
tells you they are not.
Beyond the small crowd that is gathered,
a city sprawled into the distance, but
it is not like any city that you've seen
before. Tall buildings rise out of a
thick treed landscape. These squat
creatures grip long ropes within human
strength, hoisting cargo to great
heights with giant pulleys. Up close,
you can see that they most certainly are
not human, and their clothing and makeup
emphasizes their differences. Bony
ridges run up the back of their skulls,
and many of them have painted their
skull ridges in bright reds, purples,
and whites. One creature places an
enormous nut into its mouth and crushes
it in a single bite. The others chew
incessantly, their huge teeth grinding
away at handful after handful of coarse
grass. Eventually, you take out your
scanner and point it towards these
creatures. A picture of the strange ape
man flashes on the screen. Species
identified. Homo robustus.
You've never heard of homo robustus, but
part of the name rings a bell. You
search on your scanner for related
species and find paranthropus robustus.
But paranthropus is a long deadad genus
of homminin that went extinct around 1
million years ago.
You have crossed into another reality.
One where our more robust evolutionary
relatives have survived until today.
Though alien to behold, they reflect
what the real Paranthropus species
actually look like. Their powerful
sagittal crests rose up over their skull
like a fin. Their massive teeth four
times the size of ours filled strong
jaws whose muscles distorted the shape
of their faces and gave them a bite as
strong as a hyena. And their grip
strength was equal to that of a gorilla.
These remarkable creatures lived
alongside many other hominins, including
some which scientists think were our
early ancestors. And so what exactly was
Paranthropus? What did they evolve from?
And what relation are they to us? And of
course, where did they go? Why did our
branch of ancestors survive when they
did not?
History of Humankind 10 for a special discount.
In 1335, a strange skull was found in a
gravel pit near Clarenfort in Austria.
It was longer than a human arm and ended
in a curved muzzle like a beak. This
discovery confirmed the stories the
villagers had heard as children. A water
dragon had once terrorized their town.
It had hidden in the mists and its blood
curdling roar had pierced the cold,
rainy nights. It had wre havoc, flooding
the nearby river Glenn, stalking
travelers and threatening all who live
nearby. Indeed, that was how Claron foot
got its name. Clar means wailing or
lamenting, and foot is a crossing.
Legend has it that a local juke offered
a reward to anyone brave enough and
skilled enough to kill the ferocious
beast. He' built a tower and according
to the story, a young man had tied a
bull to a chain and used it as bait to
catch the dragon. The lindworm was
killed and became the stuff of myth. And
so there wasn't much surprise when the
skull of a monstrous dragon was
discovered in 1335. But of course, as we
know now, the skull didn't actually
belong to a dragon. In 1840,
zoologologist France visited Clugenfort
to inspect the famous skull. At that
point, it hung from chains in the town
hall archive, and it was clear to Anga
it wasn't a dragon. It was the skull of
a woolly rhinoceros.
These giant shaggy beasts roamed
northern Eurasia during the freezing
plea scene until they went extinct about
10,000 years ago. And the town elders
were allegedly so upset at their local
monsters transformation into a rhino
that they sent its skull to the
Corinthian State Museum when it was
established a few years later. You can
still see it there today.
Imagine what it would be like to find
something strange or monstrous you don't
understand. Indeed, when finding ancient
fossils, it's rare to uncover an entire
skeleton. When a discovery is first
made, we are generally presented with
just a single piece of the puzzle, and
the rest of the creature must be
extrapolated from there. Of course,
today we're much better at extrapolating
than in 1335. But that doesn't mean
we've stopped finding fossils that shock
us. And indeed, in the 20th century,
monstrously shaped skulls were found
that belonged not to mythical beasts,
but to very real creatures.
In 1938, South African school boy Ge
Blanch had four of the rarest objects in
the world in his pocket.
Four strangely shaped rocks as big as
the tip of an adult's thumb. Some had a
slightly bluish tint, while others had
the ochre stain of the soil where he had
found them. Good was on the playground
when he was called to the headm's
office. He wiped his sweaty palms on his
trousers and knocked on the door. A
stranger was waiting for him and
introduced himself as Robert Broom, a
scientist who worked at a museum. Broom
stood tall in the room, taking up space
in his formal dark suit. He surveyed Ge
through small round glasses. Broom
pulled a piece of bone out of his
pocket. It was a modeled jigsaw of black
ochre and cream. Ge had seen this bone
before. The boy had sold it to a quarry
manager. Excited by its uniqueness, this
manager, a Mr. Barlow, had shown it to
Robert Broom, which had sent him looking
for the boy.
Broom was a medical doctor and
paleontologist who'd been living in
South Africa since 1897. He's perhaps
best remembered as a fossil hunter and
as one of the few early supporters of
the idea that human ancestors had once
lived in Africa. And in 1938, when Broom
visited Ge Blanch's school, the hunt was
on to find more of the remains of the
strange ape men buried beneath the
surface of southern Africa. By then, it
had been more than a decade since the
first human-like creature had been
blasted out of the rock. In 1925,
anthropologist Raymond Dart told the
world he had found the missing link
between humans and apes in Africa.
However, almost no one believed him, but
Broom was one of the few who did.
He paid the boy a shilling per tooth on
condition that he'd take him back to the
exact place where he found them. After
school finished, Ge took Broom to a
hilltop on a farm called Cromry. CromDry
means crooked turn in Africans. And
there, Broom found even more bone
fragments, and paleocientists have found
yet more in the area over the years. The
teeth were unusual, different from any
Orolopycus teeth that had been found
before. The preolars in particular were
massive. Indeed, Broom described them as
about half as large again as the
Orolopycus teeth he had found before.
And yet, he said the canines were
remarkably small. This strange creature
had a bony ridge that ran up the back of
its skull, a bit like a fin. The juror
and teeth that large must have attached
to strong jaw muscles. And the ridge
called the sagittal crest gave the jaw
strength to crush food against those
massive teeth. And indeed the teeth were
absolutely giant, sometimes as much as
four times the size of our chewing
teeth. There was no doubt that this
creature could chew better than any of
the other hominins discovered so far.
Fossilized teeth can tell us a good deal
about the diet and lifestyle of their
owner. A mouthful of canines cannot
munch on grasses, while a jaw- packed
with mullers cannot pierce and tear
flesh. This creature's teeth meant that
it clearly developed to eat grasses and
plants, limiting its food options and
its ability to consume the protein and
fat-rich meat of other creatures. That's
not to say it never ate meat, but it was
primed for plants, berries, and nuts. It
had evolved to be an expert chewer.
Broom called the creature paranthropus
robustus because he saw it as a side
branch of humanity rather than on our
direct ancestral line with the
orolopithesines.
Paranthropus means beside man while its
skull, jaws, and teeth were robust
compared to the other humanlike fossils
that had been found so far. And indeed,
when announcing the discovery, Broom was
careful not to make the same mistake as
Dart. He didn't go straight to
scientific journals with his discovery.
Instead, it was first published in the
Illustrated London News with the
headline, "Missing link no longer
missing," causing some controversy.
Multiple debates have surrounded
Paranthropus throughout the time of its
study. What exactly was it capable of?
How close? And what type of relative to
humans was it? And should it even be
given its own genus? Some scientists
disagree with broom and think the
paranthropus robustus are just a
slightly odd orolopythesine. And so they
call paranthropus species
oustropolipythecus robustus. But one
thing they do agree on is that groom's
homminin was more robust, more heavily
built than other more grassile homminin
species like us today or Raymond darts
oropithesines.
The term grassile doesn't actually have
anything to do with how they moved. It's
all about their teeth, jaws, and chewing
muscles. South Africa's other southern
apes such as Oralopycus Africanis and
Oralopythecus transfences had jewels
that were much more slender. And so
whether we grant Paranthropus its own
genus or not, Robert Broom had certainly
discovered a new lineage of hominins,
and the puzzle of this lineage was only
just beginning.
A clue came a decade later in 1948 as
Broom and his colleagues found even more
Paranthropus fossils, including a jaw.
This time the fossils came from Swart
Cran's cave, which is another site in
the same fossilrich region nestled in
the rolling savas of South Africa. Broom
tried to argue that it was a new type of
paranthropus. He even named it
Paranthropus Craidens, but the creatures
were later absorbed into Paranthropus
robustus. At the time, scientists agreed
that Paranthropus was rather strange
looking, but they didn't know just how
strange they could look. Indeed, they
had only scraped the surface of what a
robust homminin could look like.
In 1959, American paleo anthropologist
Mary Leaky found creatures with even
larger jaws and teeth thousands of miles
away from Crom Dry and Sword Crowns.
Mary and her husband Louisis Leaky had
been digging in the Old Vi Gorge in
Tanzania since the 1930s. Today, the
gorge cuts through grasslands. It's a
steep ravine about 30 mi long. And the
sides of the ravine are like a birthday
cake of geology, split into red, cream,
and ochre layers that each trap an epoch
of time. And at Old Gorge, the Leakies
had so far mainly found extinct mammals
and a variety of stone tools, including
handaxes. However, one morning, Mary
went for a walk to one of the dig sites
and noticed a bit of skull sticking out
of the ground. After painstaking
excavation, she found that there was
more than just a fragment of skull. This
was a new species of homminin. The find
was nicknamed the nutcracker man because
its skull and teeth looked like an
old-fashioned nutcracker. Lewis named
the strange creature Zinganthropus
Boyceai. Zinge being the name medieval
Muslim scholars gave Eastern Africa. and
their sponsor was mining engineer
Charles Boy, hence Boiseey. However,
this find would eventually be absorbed
into Paranthropus and became
Paranthropus Boise. Even by Paranthropus
standards, Paranthropus Boisee had giant
teeth. Indeed, its cheek teeth are four
times the size of modern humans. It also
had the thickest tooth enamel of any
known early human. Its wide, disshaped
face made space for massive muscles to
give its crunching jaw power. And
scientists are still trying to figure
out just how strong their bite was.
They've created 3D models of their teeth
and jaw and simulated how strong they
would have to clench their jaws to crush
food between those gigantic teeth. And
through these efforts, we now know that
they definitely had the strongest bite
of any hominin. One set of these
simulated muscles was able to bite down
with a force of about 5,000 newtons,
which is the same force that about six
adults exert on the ground. But what
made the Old Devi discovery so
groundbreaking, aside from being the
first paranthropus found outside of
South Africa, was that it was found in a
place littered with tools. Many tools
were discovered in the same sediment
layer as Paranthropus Boise. This
creature looked like a nutcracker toy, a
parody of a human ape. But could it have
had the capability to use tools just
like its grass cousins just like us?
1 and a half million years ago, an
ancient human treads the shoreline of
Lake Takana, and he is being watched. He
is a Homo erectus, standing tall as he
walks over the muddy shore, his body
moving much as ours would. In his hand
is an issulan handax, a pear-shaped
stone tool used earlier that morning to
carve an ancient giraffe before digging
for roots. But now something else nearby
is digging. For amongst the reeds, a
creature pauses its work and their eyes
meet. This creature, however, is
different to others that live near this
lake. smaller in height than the Homo
erectus and not exactly the same shape,
much more similar in body type than the
ancient antelopes and pigs that travel
to the water's edge or indeed the
crocodiles that lie within it. It is
perhaps most similar to the giant
baboons that roam the area, but
something behind its eyes is altogether
different to them. Perhaps not unlike
the look an ancient human would get from
the eyes of another human.
We cannot be sure exactly how much of
this the mind of a homo erectus would
have been able to compute one and a half
million years ago. But we can be
reasonably sure these encounters did
happen. Ancient humans had experiences
that no one alive today could have that
of meeting an entirely different species
of homminin. In this case, paranthropus
boisei.
Fossilized footprints have been found
near the eastern shore of Lake Turkana
that belonged to two different homminin
species. Analysis of them has proposed
these species to be homoerectus and
paranthropus boi and has found that the
footprints were made within days or
perhaps even hours of each other. This
shows the coexistence and likely
interaction between humans and
paranthropus. But what exactly was the
creature like that the homoerectus
looked upon near the shore that day? How
did it move? Did it remain hunched over
its digging or could it stand? How did
the fingers of its hands move through
the reeds? Could the hands of this
paranthropus have even held a stone
tool?
Making and using tools is not easy. For
many years, scientists and philosophers
categorized tool use as one of the
things that made us human and
importantly placed us above other
animals and other apes. With tools, we
can change the environment around us.
Tools and our ability to harness them
have ultimately allowed humans to take
over the world. And so, ever since Mary
Leaky discovered Paranthropus Boisei in
Tanzania, Paleocientists have been
debating whether these strange creatures
could use tools. The tools at Oldi
opened the question, but their
connection to Paranthropus was quickly
put in doubt by the discovery of another
species within the same sediment layers,
the human species Homohabilis. And so
the answer would remain elusive for some
time. In fact, it would be nearly 60
years until the debate took a giant leap
forward.
Green shrubs and long grasses cover the
landscape of Nyanga, a site which hugs
the northeast of Lake Victoria in Kenya.
And below the grasses is a crucial piece
of evidence in the paranthropus puzzle.
Researcher Tom Plameumber from Queens
College at City University of New York
was excavating human-made stone tools
from another Kenyan site, Canera, when
Blastoyango from the National Museum of
Kenya mentioned that evidence of similar
tools had been found nearby. They
visited this new site at Nyanga and saw
some potential. We surveyed, said
plumber, who saw some material on the
surface. And a few years later in 2015,
digging began at what would become one
of the most important sites in human
evolution. The team began excavating
into the ochre soil and soon found a
treasure trove of tools at what
scientists now think was a butchery
site. They unearthed 330 stone
artifacts, which they believe were tools
used to carve long deadad hippos and
pound plants. But something else was
very unique about the Nyanga site. At
the previous site, plumber was
excavating human fossils alongside the
tools. But at Nianga, unlike both Kanga
and Ulivi, there was no evidence of
human fossils. There were, however,
alongside these ancient stone tools, two
Paranthropus teeth.
And so, Nianka is crucial for precisely
this reason. At last, we had
Paranthropus and stone tools located
together without any other contenders on
the scene. And so, does this prove that
they had the humanlike ability to use
tools to butcher their food? Well, not
entirely. It's certainly a key piece of
evidence, but scientists also needed to
show that the creature would have been
able to hold, manipulate, and use the
tools. Human hands are superbly well
adapted for the use of tools. We have
long opposable thumbs with broad tips
that can grip and manipulate objects.
Wrists that have a large range of motion
and dozens of clever muscles that give
us a precision grip with our fingers.
The problem is proving that paranthropus
could do anything approaching the same
is tricky as it is rare to find
fossilized hands or feet. They can
detach from the bodies it decomposes or
be eaten by hungry scavengers. The bones
in the hands and feet are also small and
fragile which makes them unlikely to
survive. if the fossilization process.
And yet, a few years after the Niyanga
discovery, we would at long last get a
good look at a paranthropus hand.
At the Kooie Fora research project in
Kenya, local community partners spend 7
to 8 months a year exploring, surveying,
and excavating the earth. The site first
established as a camp by the son of
Louiswis and Mary Leaky Richard in the
1960s and now run by his daughter Louise
has been a hotbed for homminin finds and
in 2019 they found something special on
the eastern shore of Lake Turkana. It
was a partial skeleton that was then
painstakingly excavated over the next 2
years. The fossils recovered from this
skeleton of a paranthropus that lived
around 1 and a half million years ago
included teeth, skull fragments, and
also an incredibly wellpreserved set of
foot and handbones. The fossil handbones
showed the Paranthropus's hand had a
grip similar to ours, precise and
nimble, but with the strength of a
gorilla. It lacked our particularly
mobile wrists. But crucially, the
conclusion of a 2025 study on the
fossils found that it would have been
able to use tools. in their words,
complicating the evolutionary history of
hand and tool manipulation. And indeed,
the footbones were just as revealing.
They felt that the paranthropus feet
were unquestionably adapted to walking
upright on two legs. Like us, its big
toes pointed in the same direction as
the rest of its toes. Other ape's big
toes stick out to the sides, which means
they're able to better grasp branches
with their feet and climb trees. And the
joints in Paranthropus's foot also
allowed it to literally have a spring in
its step, something that enables modern
humans to push off the ground when
walking or running.
The picture of Paranthropus that these
finds give us is a stark contrast to
what we may have imagined back in the
1930s or 50s as the first Panthropus
fossils of their respective species
found the light of day. Indeed, the more
we discover about this homonyin, the
more we develop a detailed picture of a
complex mosaic of features. Some, like
gorilla grip strength or a bite power
similar to a hyena or grizzly, show us a
creature that feels truly alien. But
others, like the movement of the feet
and the somewhat dextrous potential of
the hands, paint an image of something
eerily similar to us. And so this begs
the question, what actually was
Paranthropus to us? If it is a homminin
and as such is more closely related to
us than anything else left alive today,
but where exactly in our family tree
does it sit? Could we even consider it a
human or a human ancestor?
To locate Paranthropus' position on the
homminin family tree, we need to push
backwards in time as close as possible
to where its branch diverged from the
rest of the tree. We've seen so far that
it existed alongside other homo species
one and a half million years ago. But
how much further back can we find
species of paranthropus living on Earth?
For much of the time paranthropus has
been studied, precise dating of fossils
has been difficult. Back in the days of
Broom and the Leakys, fossil dating
relied on geology rather than chemical
analysis. Scientists made their
estimations as to when an animal lived
based on the layer of soil it was found
in. Alv, for example, looks like a
layered birthday cake. Each of those
layers of sediment is linked to a
specific time band. If archaeologists
found a creature trapped in a specific
layer, then they could tell that it
lived at that time with an accuracy of
around a few hundred,000 years. However,
in the last 15 years, scientists have
developed the technology to more
confidently date paranthropus skeletons
to a more precise degree. And as a
result, we now know that paranthropus
robustus began to walk the plains of
southern Africa around 2.3 million years
ago. Paranthropus boisei individuals
found throughout eastern Africa from
Tanzania to Ethiopia existed around the
same time as their robustest brethren,
albeit thousands of miles to the
northeast. And so this evidence doesn't
discount Paranthropus from having
diverged from our human lineage. The
homogeneous had emerged a few thousand
years before this. So it would leave
open the possibility of the paranthropus
branch springing from ours shortly after
that time. However, there is one extra
thing to resolve. For Robustus and
Boisei are not the only two species of
Paranthropus.
For in 1985, scientists made a discovery
that was vital in locating Paranthropus'
position in human evolution.
British paleontologist Alan Walker was
scouting the edge of Lake Tana. Tufty
beige grass framed the bright blue green
of the lakes's water. Walker and
American anthropologist Pat Shipman had
gone to the remote spot to follow up on
reports of a hippo skull. Although no
one actually recorded if they found the
hippo as the pair became justifiably
distracted. Walker went off on his own,
only to come back a short while later
with a sly grin. He had found something
exciting. He told Pat in his classic
understated fashion, "When you finished
with that, I'll show you a homminid."
And what Alan had found looked like no
other homminid previously discovered.
Indeed, even aside from their rather
strange shape, the fossils were black.
After the creature had died, its
skeleton had lain in tuned in soil for
millions of years, and that soil was
rich in manganese, a brittle, shiny
metal. Over the millennia, the mineral
had leeched into the bones, turning them
black as they transformed into rock. But
even without the blackened otherworldly
tint, the fossils would still have been
a bit of a shock. The creature had a
remarkable sagittal crest and large
chewing teeth with thick enamel,
hallmark Panthropus features. And yet,
these fossils were estimated to be very
old. More precisely, buried in a layer
of rock that was around 2.5 million
years old. And what was more, this
discovery reminded the world of a
homminin fossil that had been found
almost two decades earlier in the Omo
Valley in Ethiopia.
In 1967, French paleontologists Camille
Armbborg and Eve Coppins had found a
single toothless jewel bone. They had
named the species Paranthropus
Ethiopicus and dated it to around 2.8
million years ago. This was much earlier
than any other Paranthropus fossil, and
no other fossils were found in the years
that followed. The scientists argued
that the Ethiopian find was some other
form of orolopiththesine and not
paranthropus at all. But when Walker
found this strange black skull in 1985,
it supported the older piece of jewel
bone from Ethiopia and Paranthropus
Ethiopicus came back from the cupboard
of discarded species and was given its
place as the oldest known form of
Paranthropus.
Later finds have continued to support
this timeline. The Nianga tools
discovered by Plumber and Onyango have
been dated with modern methods to
between 2.6 and 3 million years ago.
Plumber also noted on their discovery,
we think it's in the older end of that
range. And though the species of
Paranthropus the teeth belong to is
unclear, it gives us definitive evidence
for Paranthropus existing and perhaps
even using tools as long ago as nearly 3
million years. This scuppers the
possibility of Paranthropus emerging
from the homo lineage and shows us they
likely evolved from earlier more
grassile oropithesine species. They are
our cousins, but their robust branch
emerged on our family tree even earlier
than we once might have thought. This
shows us just how ancient this robust
homminin lineage was and also just how
long it survived on the planet. The
youngest paranthropus fossil nestled in
the rock of Sword Grant's cave could
have died as recently as 600,000 years
ago, putting their tenure on the planet
at over 2 million years. It is clear
that they were highly successful on
longived genus. And so where did they
go? Our slim-faced, grassile branch of
the homminin family endured while all
hominins with powerful jaws and giant
teeth would come to an end. Why did they
go extinct?
Megan Tyrion was built to kill.
It was about the size of a modern jaguar
but with a bigger neck. It had notably
large shoulder blades supporting
powerful shoulders and relatively short
but incredibly powerful forlims. In
fact, it was so heavily built that some
experts dispute Megan could climb trees
as well as modern jaguars. Yet, this
powerful front section came with
considerable advantages as well. For
this feline was superbly well adapted
for a quick, powerful pounce. Once in
its grasp, its vicel-like forearms and
forceful neck and shoulders could
quickly expose the neck of its prey, and
then its razor-sharp canines, so large
they likely projected from its mouth at
all times, would be put to use. Its
saber teeth could perform a canine shear
bite, penetrating the esophagus and
major blood vessels of its victim. And
sometimes the victims this ambush
machine was preying upon were hominins.
At Kooper's Cave system in South Africa,
Paranthropus and Megan Tyrion appeared
to have lived and died there together at
the same time around 1 and a half
million years ago. The big cats had been
around in Africa for a lot longer, with
the oldest example dating back at least
4 million years. And so it appears that
as the many different species of
paranthropus wandered through the grassy
plains and wooded valleys of Africa,
they were at risk from these killing
machines and others like them. The
juvenile paranthropus robuster skull
SK54 shows two 6 millm puncture wounds
consistent with the lower canines of an
African leopard. And the evidence does
not end there. In fact, it comes
handinhand with more proof of
paranthropy's upright nature. A
fossilized hip, thigh, and shin in
Swadran's layer member one was a huge
find. Indeed, it was the first
articulating hipbone, thigh bone, and
shin bone of Paranthropus Robustas
found. And it showed like the partial
boy's eye skeleton from Kooie Fora that
their South African relatives were also
like modern humans, habitual upright
walkers. This example, a female only 3'3
in tall and 60 lb in weight, also
highlighted their dimminative size. And
this size clearly came with
vulnerability because these leg bones
from Swadrans member one also displayed
according to their discoverers tooth
marks and other chewing damage identical
to that made by leopards on the bones of
their prey.
And here yet again the more we form a
full picture of paranthropus the more it
becomes a patchwork of features. These
creatures had huge teeth, powerful jaws,
and grip strength equal to that of a
gorilla. And yet, their overall stature
left them vulnerable to leopards,
hyenas, and highly specialized ancient
ambush specialists like Megant Tyrion.
And so, was this the reason for their
extinction? Were they simply an easier
meal than their taller, more grassile
homminin cousins? After 2 million years
of existence, was the Paranthropus genus
eaten to extinction?
No, because something else came for
Baranthropus between 1 2 million years
ago. Something that would also come from
Megan Tyrion.
In Slovenia, ghostly snake- like
creatures lurk in underground pools.
Their four little legs that pump against
the water and long crocodilelike snouts
that taste and scent the air. And this
is necessary because inside these caves,
the habitat of the European alm, there
is no light at all. The rare pale cave
salamanders therefore have very
underdeveloped eyes. After all, what's
the point of excellent vision when
you're surrounded by darkness, but to
make up for it, the creature is
especially sensitive to smell, touch,
movement, and even electricity, all of
which help it track prey. However, more
than a million years ago, their
ancestors lived on the surface and could
see. Researchers suspect that some
individuals fell into the caves below.
And with each successive generation,
they adapted to their new environment,
becoming highly specialized to this new
biome. And of course, if they now return
to the waters of the surface, they would
stand little chance of surviving in this
new world. Their fate is likely now
bound to these depths.
This may seem extreme, but this is
happening all around us in the natural
world on truly massive scales.
Populations become dependent on certain
niches within a biome and largecale
changes to the planet can threaten those
populations or sometimes entire species.
Indeed, changing climates can be
especially catastrophic. Most creatures
on the planet have evolved to fit into a
particular corner of an ecosystem. The
temperature just right, enough food, not
too many creatures trying to eat them.
And so when the climate starts to
change, this delicate balance is
upended. Some animals move to similar
habitats or change their behavior so
that they are more comfortable. For
example, mosquitoes have significantly
expanded their niche as global
temperatures rise today. There are even
reports of caterpillar species in the
northern hemisphere maturing earlier
each year as springs become warmer. But
of course, those that could not adapt
quickly enough become extinct, just as
Megan and Paranthropus did around the
same time.
Southern Africa, particularly the cradle
of humankind, where Paranthropus was
first discovered, was once a lush land
of woodlands, lagoons, and wetlands.
Plants were thickd, animals were
plentiful, and competition was fierce.
However, food was abundant and
Paranthropus and other homminins could
feast on nature's bounty. As well as
this, scientists suspect that places
where they find particularly high
numbers of homminin fossils had the
added attraction of fresh water, too.
But eastern Africa, in contrast, was a
much more challenging place. It was
actually more dry than it is today.
Rolling savas punctuated by the
occasional thorny thicket or tree. But
there was still water. Deep lakes
appeared and disappeared over the years,
some of them acting as transient hubs of
life for animals and homins. And we can
piece together these visions of the
ancient earth by studying the teeth of
those who lived there.
All plants contain carbon, but there are
different types of carbon.
Paleocientists are interested in two
particular kinds, carbon 12 and carbon
13, which are called isotopes of carbon.
All carbon atoms have six protons, but
they can have different numbers of
neutrons. Carbon 12 has six neutrons and
carbon 13 has seven. And the important
thing about these isotopes for
paleocientists is that they are
radioactive and so they break down over
time and we can use them to date organic
matter. Fossils, for example, have less
carbon 12 and carbon 13 in them than you
would find in the atmosphere today. And
so scientists split creatures diets into
C3 and C4 foods. C3 and C4 are types of
plants that have different ratios of
carbon 12 and carbon 13. A C3 diet has
lots of fruits and leaves, food which
you'd be more likely, of course, to find
in a place with lots of trees. A C4
diet, on the other hand, has lots of
grasses, seeds, and tubers. And these
are foods that you would be more likely
to find in savas and grasslands. So, a
C4 loving animal would have more carbon
13 in its tooth enamel. And this means
that if a carnivore eats that animal, it
would also have more carbon 13 in its
tooth enamel. And it is analysis of
these isotopes that help scientists
figure out what animals ate millions of
years ago.
And 2 million years ago, Paranthropus
was about to experience quite a shock.
The climate and landscape it was used to
was about to change. Around this time,
there were quite a few connected shifts
in the Earth's climate. There were
changes in the Earth's orbit around the
sun and the tilt on its axis, and this
led to greater variability in climate.
The Walker circulation began to shift. A
massive global heat exchange system that
operates in the atmosphere that is
closely linked to El Nino and Leninia,
climate patterns that influence
rainfall. This meant the days got colder
and drier and some types of vegetation
died out whilst others flourished. And
in South Africa in particular, the
landscape got drier and woodlands gave
way to grassy savas. Meanwhile, trees
became more common in Eastern Africa and
grasses were overwhelmed by woody brush.
And this is where teeth and jaws can
start to decide who lives and who dies.
Paranthropus' big teeth constrained the
types of foods they could eat. While
they did adapt to eat the plants that
were available to them, they lived in a
narrow niche and couldn't pivot to new
foods fast enough. This meant that when
the climate changed, vegetation followed
suit and competition for their preferred
food increased, they were in trouble.
Individuals died and entire communities
died out and the populations began to
fragment. Groups of Paranthropus would
eventually get smaller and smaller until
they ultimately disappeared. Indeed,
Paranthropus' diets were so tailored to
their environments that even the
different species ate slightly different
foods. Scientists have analyzed the
scratches and marks on their teeth and
they found that they inhabited different
ecological niches. Panthropus boy's eye
in Eastern Africa, for example, chewed
on leaves and grasses for hours rather
than cracking nuts between their teeth
as suggested decades ago. Panthropus
robusters, however, had a more varied
diet, and their teeth reflect that with
their pitted holes and worn tooth
enamel. And this slightly more
generalized nature perhaps influenced
them lasting longer. The window often
given for paranthropus boey extinction
is between 1.4 and 1.2 million years ago
with some individuals perhaps surviving
until a million years ago. Robustus,
however, is slightly later, 1.2 to 1
million years ago, with the last
survivors making their way into the last
million years. But sometime roughly
600,000 years ago, after over 2 million
years of existence, the last
Paranthropus closed its eyes on a world
that had undergone remarkable changes
throughout the lifetime of its genus.
Though, of course, Paranthropus was far
from the last homminin.
Megantyion was survived by other
saber-tooththed cats such as Hometherum,
which stayed in existence until as late
as 12,000 years ago. Homothetherum,
unlike the generally solitary
Megantyion, hunted in packs, which
offered a variety of advantages, one of
which being an increased ability to
defend their kills from aggressive
carcass stealing scavengers.
Some of those scavengers came in the
form of giant ancient hyenas, others
walked on two legs. For Paranthropus was
survived by the grassile hominins. And
so what was it about this lineage that
allowed them, our ancestors, to outlast
their more robust cousins? And how does
our own species, Homo sapiens, fit into
the story?
In the early half of the 20th century,
rangers at Yusede National Park wouldn't
discourage people from leaving rubbish
for bears to eat. In fact, they went one
step further. They made a show of it. In
a large illuminated area surrounded by
benches for spectators, rangers would
dump huge amounts of leftovers,
sometimes attracting up to 20 or 30
bears to compete for the food. Onlookers
would cheer these garbage pitch shows.
And the descendants of these bears still
rummage through bins and landfills at
any chance they get. Indeed, brown bears
will eat almost anything. They have a
variety of teeth that allow them to do
everything from grip a wet salmon to
grind through tree bark. Their diet
includes, but it's not limited to
leaves, moss, nuts, pine cones, roots,
grasses, fruits, flowers, mushrooms,
clams, crabs, eggs, mice, squirrels,
deer thorns, and even ants or moths.
Grizzlies in the Rocky Mountains will
eat up to 40,000 army cutwa moths in a
single day during the summer as they
load up on calories before the winter.
This ability to eat a vast range of food
allows them to avoid the hassle of
migrating to stay alongside food
sources. Instead, using these calories
to hibernate for the winter. And so,
what begins with their teeth and broad
diets has implications for the rest of
their body and can even open the door to
new capabilities and patterns of
behavior.
Whatever form an animal takes is
essentially a bet, and there are many
ways to play the game. Some animals are
highly specialized, dependent on a
single food source or habitat. Koalas,
for example, are entirely reliant on
eucalyptus leaves for food and habitat.
The lack of energy in these leaves
causes them to sleep for 18 to 20 hours
a day. But they have survived doing this
for more than quarter of a million
years, possibly longer than our species
has existed thus far. Whereas other
animals are shown with a diet of brown
bears rely on variety and versatility to
survive. And so what bet had our
ancestors made back in the time of
Paranthropus? What form had we taken?
What did we eat? And how did we live?
Kenyan paleocientist Kamoya Kamehu was
recognized as one of the world's
greatest fossil hunters and
single-handedly rewrote large tracks of
the human story. He seemed to have an
innate knack for spotting shards of bone
nudging out of a rock's surface. And in
1984, he was scouting for fossils along
the western shore of Lake Turkana. He
spotted a section of skull on the shore
of a dried up riverbed. And it revealed
what was then the most complete hominin
ever found. Takana boy, as they called
the skeleton, would have been between 7
and 11 years old when he died. Despite
his young age, he would have stood at
about a meter and a half tall and if he
had lived, could have reached the height
of an adult man today. And this makes
him very tall when lined up alongside
other hominins that were around at the
time. But he'd been trapped in the
sediment for more than 1 and a half
million years. His species was dubbed
Homoagasta or the African homoerectus
and looked much more like later humans
than the homminins that had been
discovered before. the ape-like
orolopithesines, the robust paranthropus
or the smallrained homohabilis.
Indeed, Takana boy like other homoagasta
and homoerectus individuals resembles
us. He had long legs for walking and
shorter, weaker arms that were less able
to climb trees, and his teeth also
resembled ours. The larger chunkier
teeth of Oralopythecus and the massive
teeth of Paranthropus begin to disappear
from the fossil record in favor of
smaller mers and preolars. And as the
teeth got smaller, so did the jaw. It
needed less power to chew and grind
food. And in fact, scientists think that
Tana Boy's teeth were what actually got
him killed all those years ago. He had
the fragments of a broken milk tooth in
his mouth. And scientists think that he
got an infection between that old tooth
and a new erupting preolar. The mouth
infection would have poisoned his blood
and killed him.
And so as homminid fossils get younger
and closer to modern humans, their
grassile traits continue while robust
features disappear. Homo's teeth become
smaller and their faces start to stick
out less. Paranthropus' face jutted out
more than ours or even Homoagasta and
Homo erectus. Although later homminins
still had strong jaws, they would never
again be as powerful as giant tooththed
paranthropus. And so just how crucial
was our reduced tooth and jaw size to
our eventual survival?
The difficulty in examining the pattern
of human origins is that we do not know
exactly what was cause and what was
effect. But grassile teeth and jaws
appear to have offered later species an
advantage. One benefit is that smaller,
sharper teeth allow you to pierce
objects with less force. Paranthropus
mouths were highly specialized grinding
machines, but rasile humans could eat a
wider variety of foods than their robust
cousins and could consequently survive a
tumultuous climate and changing
environments. And of course, this wider
variety of food included the more
regular consumption of meat.
Paranthropus could and would eat meat.
They, like us and our ancestors, were
omnivores and would eat whatever they
could get their hands on and teeth into.
But experts believe that paranthropus
meat consumption was more occasional and
opportunistic, whereas grassile
homminins took meat consumption to whole
new levels. Although despite this, human
teeth don't scream meate eater. When
compared to carnivores like lions or
even other meat heavy omnivores like
badgers, raccoons or bears, they all
have much more pronounced canines to
tear at meat. Human teeth, on the other
hand, are highly generalized. Our array
of incizers, canines, and mers are
capable of tearing, grinding, and
cutting without specializing too heavily
in any one aspect. This would have been
useful when having to rely on new or
changing food sources and also left us
able to eat large quantities of meat
when presented with the opportunity by
our advanced tools enabled by our large
brains.
And so grassho humans may be defined and
categorized as such by their teeth which
has been a useful way to classify fines
over the decades. But we do have other
features that are vastly different to
Paranthropus as well.
Though Paranthropus could walk upright,
the grassile homogeneous became masters
of traveling long distances, allowing us
to search far and wide for food and
other resources. As well as this, our
walking legs freed up our arms so that
we could do other things while we were
moving. And we took this much further
than Paranthropus. This included
multi-use handaxes like those developed
by Homo Erectus and also the eventual
use of the spear. And these types of
tools allowed us to hunt, multiplying
our food opportunities even further,
eventually helping us fend off larger
predators that might look to kill us,
and even helping us compete with
predators like Megan Tyrion for their
kills. All of this brought calories,
feeding brain size, and in turn allowing
for more complex tools and strategies to
be formed. And as our brains were
getting bigger, our hands were getting
nimler, thus more suitable for more
precise work. And so we may share a
common ancestor with Paranthropus deep
in the heyday of the orolopythecines.
But the longer our ancestors existed
alongside Paranthropus, the more
different from them they became. By the
time of their extinction, we had become
capable of many things well beyond their
grasp. And we continued to break new
boundaries after they were gone. And
this journey is not over. Our species
has created a great many new things,
especially over the last 50,000 years.
And interestingly, our teeth are
continuing to evolve as well.
As recently as 12,000 years ago, the
human diet underwent a dramatic shift.
When humans began farming, we shifted
from the foods we foraged, which were
coarse and hard to chew, to foods that
we grew. Cereals and fruits became
softer as we bred them for taste and
ease of eating. And our teeth and jaws
changed with our food. In Argentina,
researchers have investigated the dental
and jaw differences in two populations.
One group in the Andes mountains that
had turned to farming generations before
and another group in the Andes that had
maintained a huntergatherer lifestyle.
They found that there was a notable
difference in their jaws and teeth. When
there is less stress on the jaw, it
begins to shrink. And it doesn't
necessarily take millennia for human
jaws and teeth to adapt, with some
research suggesting that it can happen
within a generation. Some scientists
think that this is even why crooked
teeth are becoming more common. Jaws are
getting smaller and weaker, but the
number of teeth people develop has
remained the same. This results in
overcrowding in their mouths and teeth
jostling for space and starting to
overlap or go crooked. And as time goes
on, it's likely that our teeth and jaws
will continue to adapt to our
environment and lifestyle, just as the
rest of our bodies, our brains, and our
mental capabilities will.
The ability to adapt has always been
humans greatest strength and has seen
Homo sapiens emerge as the dominant
animal on the planet. While
Paranthropus' robust teeth and jaws made
them perfect inhabitants of their
southern and eastern African homes for
millions of years when the world started
to change, they were left stranded by
these features. Unable to adapt fast
enough, our grassile ancestors
generalized teeth and jaws were just one
of the weapons in their arsenal, giving
them the flexibility to adapt and cope
when times were hardest, helping them
pass their genes from generation to
generation until they were passed on to
us.
us what you think. Thanks for watching
and we'll see you next time.