What did Paranthropus look like?
The importance of Paranthropus
The discovery of the first Paranthropus robustus at Kromdraai in 1938 helped change the way anthropologists saw the evolution of humankind.
The flat-faced Paranthropus existed in South and East Africa from about 2.5-million to 1-million years ago. Its large jaws and teeth were adapted to grinding tough food such as roots, hard seeds and berries.
An offshoot of the lineage leading to humanity, it was not a direct ancestor, but more like a distant cousin. With the discovery of Paranthropus, scientists realised that the evolutionary path to modern humankind was not a simple sequence in which one set of human ancestors evolved over time, in a neat chain of progression. It is a complicated – and still contested – family tree, with many branches breaking off as species of ancestral relatives became extinct.