This article appeared in Discover’s annual state of science issue as “Chipped Teeth Offer Evolutionary Clues.” Support our science journalism by becoming a subscriber.
The individuals never mingled because they lived nearly 3,000 miles and 1 million years apart. But a chipped tooth from each met the same end — dissolved in acid at the University of Copenhagen.
These human ancestors, who roamed different patches of Eurasia roughly 1.77 million and 800,000 years ago, respectively, share a claim to fame: Their fossilized teeth harbored the oldest surviving proteins from extinct human species — molecules more than twice as old as human DNA. The strings of protein code, reported last April in Nature, provide long-sought details about a patchy chapter of our evolution.
Anthropologists know a good deal about hominins — humans and our fossil relatives — who evolved in Africa before 2 million years ago. Then hominin groups began spreading ...
