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Afar fossil shows broad distribution and versatility of Paranthropus

Nature volume 650, pages 381–388 (2026)Cite this article

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Abstract

The Afar depression in northeastern Ethiopia contains a rich palaeontological and archaeological record, which documents 6 million years of human evolution. Abundant faunal evidence links evolutionary patterns with palaeoenvironmental change as a principal underlying force1. Many of the earlier hominin taxa recognized today are found in the Afar, but Paranthropus has been conspicuously absent from the region. Here we report on the discovery, in the Mille-Logya research area, of a partial mandible that we attribute to Paranthropus, dated to between 2.5 and 2.9 million years ago and found in a well-understood chronological and faunal context. The find is among the oldest fossils attributable to Paranthropus and indicates that this genus, from its earliest known appearance, had a greater geographic distribution than previously documented2. Often seen as a dietary specialist feeding on tough food, the range of diverse habitats with which eastern African Paranthropus can now be associated shows that this suggested adaptive niche did not restrict its ability to disperse as widely as species of Australopithecus and early Homo. The discovery of Paranthropus in the Afar emphasizes how little is known about hominin evolution in eastern Africa during the crucial period between 3 and 2.5 million years ago, when this genus and the Homo lineage presumably emerged.

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Fig. 1: Location of the MLP area.
Fig. 2: MLP-3000-1 partial left mandible.
Fig. 3: MLP-3000 left mandibular corpus.
Fig. 4: Canine and premolar roots of MLP-3000.
Fig. 5: Mandibular corpus robusticity.
Fig. 6: Mandibular alveolar proportions.

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Data availability

The original fossil, MLP-3000, is housed at the National Museum of Ethiopia, and data analysed here are provided in the Article and its Supplementary Information. All digital data used in this manuscript are presented in the Supplementary Information and Extended Data Tables 1–6. Request to access the three-dimensional scan of MLP-3000 should be sent to the Ethiopian Heritage Authority at yonasyilma2627@gmail.com.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the Ethiopian Heritage Authority, especially Y. Desta, A. Yalew, D. Dagne, S. Melaku and Y. Assefa, as well as the Afar Regional State Culture and Tourism Bureau for support and permission; the administration of Mille and Seraitu districts and the locals therein for their support; M. G/Selassie and the rest of the MLP field crew for logistical support; the National Museum of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa; the National Museums of Kenya, Nairobi; the National Museum of Tanzania, Dar es Salaam; the Evolutionary Studies Institute, Witwatersrand University, Johannesburg; the Ditsong National Museum of Natural History, Pretoria; the Senckenberg Museum, Frankfurt; M. Leakey, E. Mbua, F. Manthi, P. Msemwa, A. Kwekason, F. Thackeray, B. Zipfel, L. Kgasi, K. Reed and F. Schrenk for access to hominin fossils; Z.-X. Luo and A. Neander for facilitating CT scanning of MLP-3000; and C. Caton, C. Dean, H. Hanegraef and M. Skinner for help and advice. We thank R. Van Sessen for help with formatting. Fieldwork was funded by M. and W. Hearst and the University of Chicago. Further laboratory research was supported by M. and W. Hearst, the University of Chicago, the Calleva Foundation and the Max Planck Society.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

    Zeresenay Alemseged

  2. Centre for Human Evolution Research, Natural History Museum, London, UK

    Fred Spoor

  3. Department of Human Origins, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany

    Fred Spoor

  4. Department of Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

    Denné Reed

  5. Department of Anthropology, Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology, The George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA

    W. Andrew Barr

  6. CR2P-UMR 7207, CNRS, Sorbonne Université, CP 38, Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris, France

    Denis Geraads

  7. Department of Science, Gorongosa National Park, Goinha, Mozambique

    René Bobe

  8. ICArEHB, Universidade do Algarve, Faro, Portugal

    René Bobe

  9. School of Anthropology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    René Bobe

  10. Directorate for Geosciences, National Science Foundation, Alexandria, VA, USA

    Jonathan G. Wynn

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Contributions

Z.A. initiated the field project. Z.A., J.G.W., D.R., W.A.B. and D.G. designed and outlined the topic. Z.A., F.S. and D.R. analysed and interpreted hominin data. Z.A., W.A.B., D.R. and D.G. conducted field surveys and fossil recovery. J.G.W. carried out geological surveys, mapping and analyses. Z.A., F.S., D.R., W.A.B., R.B. and J.G.W. wrote the manuscript with contributions and discussion from all authors.

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Correspondence to Zeresenay Alemseged.

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Extended data figures and tables

Extended Data Fig. 1 Stratigraphy and site.

a, Stratigraphic sections, sedimentary content, volcanic markers, and relationships among the three fossiliferous zones (Gafura, Seraitu, and Uraitele) at the Mille-Logya Research area. The MLP-3000 mandible comes from the Seraitu lake beds and has an estimated age of 2.6 Ma. Red arrow shows approximate position. Modified from ref. 18. b, Survey, crawling and screening at the MLP-3000 locality. c, d, searching for and reconstructing MLP-3000 fragments in the field. Diagram in a adapted from ref. 18, Springer Nature Limited, under a Creative Commons licence CC BY 4.0.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Canine and premolar root size of MLP-3000.

a-b, Root size of the lower C and P3, plotting maximum mesiodistal diameter versus labiolingual (a) and buccolingual (b) diameter. MLP-3000 (red dot) is compared with Australopithecus afarensis (pink triangles), Paranthropus aethiopicus (blue dots), P. boisei (light blue dots), P. robustus (grey diamonds) and early Homo (green squares). Convex hull are given in the same colour. Arrows for the C root of MLP-3000 indicate that minimum values are plotted. Data in Supplementary Table 2.

Extended Data Fig. 3 MLP-3000-1 lower left molar crown.

a-i, M, mesial; D, distal; B, buccal; L, lingual; pr, protoconid; me, metaconid; en, entoconid; hy, hypoconid; hu, hypoconulid. Scale bar of 5 mm applies to all images a. CT-based 3D visualization in occlusal view with enamel shown in grey, exposed dentine in brown, and a matrix-filled crack in off-white. b, CT section through the roof of the pulp cavity. The latter is matrix-filled and shown in light grey. c, CT slice of the left M1 of mandible KNM-WT 16005 (Paranthropus aethiopicus), equivalent to b and showing the full roof topography reflecting the cuspal arrangement. d, mesiodistal CT section through the dentine horns of the metaconid and entoconid. e, Buccolingual CT section through the dentine horns of the protoconid and metaconid. f-I, Buccal part of the protoconid as shown in e, with reconstructed enamel shown by the yellow line. f, Showing light occlusal wear and surface weathering of the buccal face. g, As f, but with stronger occlusal wear. h, With occlusal wear and buccal erosion to provide relative enamel thickness equivalent to the thinnest enamel known for P. aethiopicus lower molars. i, As h, but equivalent to the thinnest enamel known for P. boisei and P. robustus lower molars.

Extended Data Fig. 4 Alveolar and crown proportions.

a-c, Occlusal view of mandibles A.L. 444-2 (a, Australopithecus afarensis; reconstructed, reversed right side), MLP-3000 (b, Paranthropus sp.) and KNM-ER 15930 (c, Paranthropus boisei). Scale bar 10 mm. The red lines mark the combined mesiodistal length of the P4-M3 alveoli, and the yellow lines that of the P3-C alveoli. The latter is relatively short in Paranthropus (see also Fig. 4), noting that all three mandibles share a similar combined mesiodistal length of the C-M3 alveoli. The blue arrows indicate where the anterior ramus margin separates from the corpus; morphology not preserved in MLP-3000 (?). d, Left labiobuccal view of a well-occluding modern human dentition, showing that the mesiodistal length of the upper C crown (blue line) spatially impacts the combined mesiodistal length of the lower C and P3 crowns and alveoli (yellow line). e, Bivariate plot of mesiodistal crown lengths of the upper C against the P3-M3 row for A. afarensis (pink triangles), Australopithecus garhi (yellow dot), P. boisei (light blue dots) and P. robustus (grey diamonds). Convex hulls are given in the same colour. See Extended Data Table 6 for the individual data. P. boisei and P. robustus have a relatively smaller upper C crown than both Australopithecus species. Following the spatial relationship shown in d this difference is reflected by the relative shorter mesiodistal length of the lower C-P3 alveoli in Paranthropus (c) than in A. afarensis (a). See also Fig. 4.

Extended Data Table 1 Mandibular Corpus dimensions
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Extended Data Table 2 Dental measurements of MLP-3000 compared
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Extended Data Table 3 Lower premolar root shapes
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Extended Data Table 4 Enamel thickness of MLP-3000 compared
Full size table
Extended Data Table 5 Correlation and regression
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Extended Data Table 6 Upper crown measurements
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Alemseged, Z., Spoor, F., Reed, D. et al. Afar fossil shows broad distribution and versatility of Paranthropus. Nature 650, 381–388 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09826-x

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