June 12, 2003	Thursday	Rabi-us-Sani 11, 1424

LONDON, June 11: A team of international scientists have unearthed 160,000-year-old fossils in Ethiopia that they say are the oldest known remains of early modern humans ever found.

The skulls of two adults and a child, discovered in the Herto Village about 225 kms from Addis Ababa, fill in the missing fossil record between African pre-humans and early modern humans, the researchers said on Wednesday.

They show early modern humans co-existed with neanderthals and support the “Out of Africa” theory that humans evolved in Africa and then spread to other areas of the world.

“Now we have a great sequence of fossils showing that we evolved in Africa, and not all over the globe,” said Tim White, a paleoanthropologist at the University of California at Berkeley, who headed the team.

In two papers published in the science journal Nature on Wednesday, White and scientists from Ethiopia and other countries describe the fossils, which were found on a site along with stone tools and the remains of large animals.

Pieces of skull and teeth from seven other individuals were also found. The most complete skull is of a male adult with heavily worn teeth.

“The fossils of a creature named Homo Sapiens Edaltus are unique because they are the nearest to modern man,” Berhane Asfaw, a paleontologist at the Rift Valley Research Service in Ethiopia, told a news conference in Addis Ababa.

The scientists believe the early modern humans lived near a shallow fresh water lake inhabited by catfish and crocodiles and had a taste for hippos.—Reuters