Ahira's Hangar

ONDON (Reuters) - A team of international scientists has unearthed 160,000-year-old fossils in Ethiopia they say are the oldest-known remains of early modern humans ever found.

The skulls of two adults and a child, discovered in the Herto Village about 140 miles from Addis Ababa, fill in the missing fossil record between African pre-humans and early modern humans, the researchers said Wednesday.

They show early modern humans co-existed with Neanderthals and support the "Out of Africa" theory that humans evolved in Africa and then spread to other areas of the world.

"Now we have a great sequence of fossils showing that we evolved in Africa, and not all over the globe," said Tim White, a paleoanthropologist at the University of California at Berkeley, who headed the team.

In two papers published in the science journal Nature Wednesday, White and scientists from Ethiopia and other countries describe the fossils, which were found on a site along with stone tools and the remains of large animals.

Pieces of skull and teeth from seven other individuals were also found. The most complete skull is of a male adult with heavily worn teeth.

"The fossils of a creature named Homo Sapiens Edaltus are unique because they are the nearest to modern man," Berhane Asfaw, a paleontologist at the Rift Valley Research Service in Ethiopia, told a news conference in Addis Ababa.

Edaltus means "old man" in the Afar language.

TASTE FOR HIPPOS

The scientists believe the early modern humans lived near a shallow freshwater lake inhabited by catfish and crocodiles and had a taste for hippos. They used tools to hunt or scavenge for food.

It took the researchers three years to clean and restore the fossils, which were found in 1997, before they could be compared and analyzed.

"These are wonderful finds. I think they are the most important finds of early modern humans anywhere up to now," Chris Stringer, of the Natural History Museum in London, told Reuters.

"This is extremely important material. It is also very informative because it shows us that there is an evolutionary link going back to earlier African people," Stringer, who wrote a commentary on the findings, added.

The skulls show a high and rounded brain case, small brow ridges and a small face tucked in under the cranial vault, which Stringer said were some of the most characteristic features of modern humans.

The fossils are non-Neanderthal and show early humans had evolved in Africa before the European Neanderthals disappeared.

"They demonstrate conclusively that there was never a Neanderthal stage in human evolution," F. Clark Howell, also from Berkeley and a co-author of the research papers, said in a statement. (Additional reporting by Tsegaye Tadesse in Addis Ababa) <i></i>