Once again, we have an amazing anthropological find out of Ethiopia that sheds light – and raises questions – about the evolution of our species and our primate cousins.

After 15 years of rumors, researchers in the U.S. and Ethiopia on Thursday made public fossils from a 4.4-million-year-old human forebearer they say reveals that our earliest ancestors were more modern than scholars assumed and deepens the evolutionary gulf separating humankind from today's apes and chimpanzees. The highlight of the extensive fossil trove is a female skeleton a million years older than the iconic bones of Lucy, the primitive female figure that has long symbolized humankind's beginnings. After 15 years of rumors, researchers in the U.S. and Ethiopia on Thursday made public fossils from a 4.4-million-year-old human forebearer they say reveals that our earliest ancestors were more modern than scholars assumed and deepens the evolutionary gulf separating humankind from today's apes and chimpanzees. The highlight of the extensive fossil trove is a female skeleton a million years older than the iconic bones of Lucy, the primitive female figure that has long symbolized humankind's beginnings.

The potentially earthshaking aspect of this discovery is that anthropologists may have had it all wrong in thinking that humans evolved away from our earliest prehuman ancestors while chimps, monkeys and apes remain closer to our common ancestors. It appears that we may be more faithful to that common ancestor and the primates are the ones that spun of on an evolutionary tangent. I can’t wait to learn more – because I’ll be teaching this in my classes in the future.