Questions have been raised on the origins of ancient teeth found in Germany Naturhistorisches Museum Mainz

Hold that rewrite of the textbook view of human evolution. Two 9.7-million-year-old fossil teeth from Germany probably did not come from a previously unknown European root of the human lineage, as heralded in headlines over the last few days. There remains no hard evidence that our hominin ancestors originated anywhere but Africa.

Reports went viral over the weekend that Herbert Lutz at the Museum of Natural History in Mainz, Germany, had discovered a previously unknown European species of ape that had human-like teeth millions of years before African species did.

The story came to light in an unusual way. So far, Lutz’s paper has not been published in a scientific journal, but only on the website ResearchGate that some scientists use to share their papers. On Friday, ResearchGate distributed a press release that included an interview with Lutz and a link to a paper that has not yet been published in a journal but was “being published in advance due to the importance of the fossils described”.


The German-language newspaper Die Welt had run the story on Wednesday, following a press conference by the museum. Another German report heralded a “sensational” find and quoted Mainz mayor Michael Ebling as saying: “I would suggest that we must start rewriting the history of mankind after today.”

However, anthropologists contacted by New Scientist say the finds do not require any such rethink.

A pair of gnashers

The paper describes two amber-coloured teeth, which Lutz and his colleagues claim come from the same animal – a great ape. They identified one as a canine with a striking resemblance to the teeth of Australopithecus afarensis, a hominin that lived in Africa around 3 million years ago and gave us the famed “Lucy” fossil. The other tooth is a molar, which the team argued was less useful for identifying the owner.

The teeth are from Germany’s Eppelsheim formation, which has previously yielded many important mammal fossils from around 10 million years ago, including a femur found in the 1820s said to be the first recognised primate fossil. Lutz’s group had worked on the site for 17 years, but only found the teeth last year.

The paper calls the find “a new great ape with startling resemblances” to African hominins. The implication is that the evolutionary transition from great apes to early hominins – species that share a common ancestor with humans and chimps – happened in Europe, not in Africa as generally believed.

At the time there were many apes in Europe, and they were evolving in diverse ways. For this reason, a few anthropologists, such as David Begun at the University of Toronto in Canada, have suggested that our ape ancestors spent a formative period in Europe – although they still agree that later hominin evolution, including that of the australopithecines and the origin of our own species, occurred solely in Africa.

There is also a set of 5.7-million-year-old footprints from a Greek island near Crete that were apparently made by a hominin, suggesting that at least some early hominins made it out of Africa.

The problem is that other anthropologists are confident the teeth do not belong to a hominin, or even a great ape.

Wrong teeth

According to Begun, the molar belongs to an extinct primate called a pliopithecoid, a cousin of apes and Old World monkeys. These animals were only distantly related to hominins.

The “canine” is even less human-like. Begun says it appears to belong to a ruminant – a hoofed, cud-chewing mammal such as a deer. “It has a funny break that makes it look a bit like a canine, but it is definitely not a canine nor is it a primate,” he says.

In a comment posted on ResearchGate, anthropologist Monte McCrossin at New Mexico State University came to the same conclusions. “Sadly, this discovery isn’t at all what it claims to be; it’s fool’s gold,” he wrote. “This site in Germany has nothing whatsoever to do with human evolution.”

This does not mean the discovery is worthless, though. “The molar is important,” says Begun. The femur found in Eppelsheim in the 1820s had been suggested as belonging to a pliopithecoid, and finding a pliopithecoid molar supports that idea.