This TED Talk features biological anthropologist Juliet Brofi, recorded live at TEDx LSU, 2018.

Human origins. Who are we? Where do we come from? And how do we know? In my field, paleoanthropology, we explore human origins, the who and where questions

by analyzing fossils that date back thousands and even millions of years.

In 2015, a team of colleagues and I named a new species in the genus Homo, our genus, Homo Noletti.

Let's take a step back and put that into context.

The last common ancestors between humans and chimps

date somewhere between six and eight million years.

The earliest hominens or earliest human ancestors evolved in a group known as the

Australopithecines. The Australopithecines evolved into the genus Homo and eventually modern humans,

us. With each new fossil discovery, we get a little bit closer to better understanding who we are

and where we came from. With these new fossil finds, we realize we now have to make changes to this tree.

Until this discovery, we thought we had a pretty good idea about the patterns of evolutionary change.

Current fossil evidence suggests that the earliest populations

of the genus Homo evolved in Africa somewhere between 2 and 3 million years.

Fast forward to approximately 300,000 years

to where we see the origins of the first modern humans.

While the fossil record between these timeframes in Africa is relatively sparse,

the fossils nonetheless demonstrated certain trends from our earliest ancestors to modern humans.

For example, our brains were becoming larger relative to the rest of our body.

Our pelvies were becoming more bowl shape, and our hand-wrists, morphology, or form

suggested a change in our grip as we began to make and use stone tools and spend less time in the trees.

These new fossils disrupt everything we thought we knew about these trends

...