Gorongosa 2024-FULL-FINAL - Flipbook - Page 73
PA L EO NTOLOGY
GORONGOSA SP ECIAL
looking to fill out the
pages of humanity’s family album, a cache of ancient teeth
unearthed over the past few years at Gorongosa National
Park in Mozambique could be like sepia-toned photos
from the old neighborhood.
Yet the original owners of the teeth are far from
human. In fact, the most startling specimens among them, discovered
at an elevation of approximately 1,000 feet, come from the jaws of the
genus Galeocerdo—tiger shark—an animal that doesn’t even live on
land. Another set is from an ancient version of a hyrax, a distant, furry
relative of elephants. Others are from the gargantuan Deinotherium—
Greek for “terrible beast”—yet another relative of elephants, whose
ancient tusks protruded from their lower jaws like great inverted
question marks. A pair of incisors from an ape comes the closest
to something in our evolutionary neighborhood, but they’re older
than the light flickering from the Andromeda Galaxy and predate the
emergence of our genus, Homo, by at least an epoch or so.
This mixed snapshot of past life found in a vein of sandstone and
clay in the East African Rift System comes from the Miocene Epoch—
a window of time stretching from about 23 million to 5 million years
ago—that saw enormous development of vertebrates, particularly
apes and other mammals.
Yet like most things in paleontology, this trove is only a tiny
fragment of a puzzle offered up piecemeal by the earth, at first glance
disjointed and haphazard—the commas and consonants, perhaps, of
a single stanza from a much, much longer verse.
To Susana Carvalho and her team at Gorongosa’s Paleo-Primate
Project, these osteogenic antiquities mark the beginnings of a sweeping narrative involving the life, death, and the shifting landscapes of
our cagey hominin ancestors, the creatures with which they shared
the planet, and the environment in which they emerged.
“Even by looking at these other species that are not hominids,
that are not apes, we’re also looking at the species that our ancestors
evolved with and interacted with,” says René Bobe, the head paleontologist on the Gorongosa project.
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COURTES Y OF GO RONGO S A N AT IONA L PAR K
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OR THE PALEOANTHROPOLOGISTS
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