Digging for Our Origins in the Bone Beds of an African Park
For the paleoanthropologists 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
