Two articles published in the journal “Nature” report different aspects of a research on a fossil skull of Australopithecus anamensis, the oldest species of its genus and considered the ancestor of Australopithecus afarensis, the species to which the individual nicknamed Lucy belongs. Yohannes Haile-Selassie, Stephanie Melillo and several colleagues in the two teams studied an almost complete fossil skull, which makes it by far the best preserved one among the ones attributed to that species. It offers new information on the history of australopithecines and therefore of the evolution of hominins which led to that of human beings.

An article published in the journal “Science Advances” reports a study of the known fossil skull of Chilecebus carrascoensis, an extinct monkey that lived about 20 million years ago, in the Miocene period, in today’s Chile. A team of researchers subjected it to a high resolution CT scan to obtain a 3D digital reconstruction that allowed to study its internal structure and therefore the brain’s structure. The new information on this primitive relative of monkeys and hominids that evolved later suggest that the evolution of these primates’ brains was non-linear and that it grew several times independently.