Several hominins at once
The mid-Pliocene holds at least three or four contemporaneous hominin species, not a single line.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 400 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 200 thousand years
- Era
- Pliocene, Cenozoic
Kenyanthropus platyops from Kenya, Australopithecus deyiremeda and Australopithecus afarensis from Ethiopia, and Australopithecus bahrelghazali from Chad all date to roughly the same window around 3.5 to 3.3 million years ago. Whether all are valid species is argued, but the general picture is not: hominin evolution is a branching bush with multiple coexisting species, and the familiar image of a single line marching toward modernity is wrong at almost every point in the record.