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First known fossil hand of the hominin Paranthropus boisei

Hand bones from a human relative, found in Kenya, reveal features similar to those of living gorillas, complicating the evolutionary history of hand and tool manipulation.
By
  1. Tracy L. Kivell

    1. Tracy L. Kivell is in the Department of Human Origins, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig 04103, Germany, at the Institute for Zoology and Evolutionary Research, Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, Germany, and at the Centre for the Exploration of the Deep Human Journey, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.

  2. Samar M. Syeda

    1. Samar M. Syeda is in the Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History, New York City, New York 10024, USA.

A human relative, the hominin Paranthropus boisei (which lived from at least 2.6 million to 1.3 million years ago)1,2 has long been recognized as one of our most distinctive extinct relations. The species is defined by a robust jaw with large molar teeth, a flat face with broad cheek bones and, in some cases, pronounced bony ridges on the skull that would have enabled the attachment of powerful chewing muscles1−3. These features, together with chemical signatures found in dental analyses, suggest that P. boisei had a specialized diet of tough-to-process foods, such as grasses and sedge plants, that smaller-toothed hominins might not have been able to eat4. However, shockingly little is known about what the rest of the skeleton of P. boisei looked like1. Writing in Nature, Mongle et al.5 now provide some answers by presenting long-sought fossils.

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Nature 647, 858-859 (2025)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-03129-x

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Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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