Eighteen newly described hominin fossils from a single cave in South Africa include an adult Homo erectus, the first of its species recovered from that site, a specimen catalogued as DNH 127 and dated to about 2 million years ago. The fossils come from Drimolen Main Quarry, also called Drimolen Cave, in South Africa’s Cradle of Humankind. La Trobe University researchers led the description, and they place the adult roughly 200,000 years before the Homo erectus adults known from Dmanisi, Georgia.
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The set belongs to two species, Homo erectus and Paranthropus robustus, and the cave has been giving up material since it was found in 1992. Excavation ran through 2019. The new paper pulls cranial and jaw remains from those digs into one published description, which is why a find first recovered years ago is being announced now.
The eighteen fossils from Drimolen Main Quarry
The work appears in Annals of Human Biology as “New hominin cranial and mandibular remains from Drimolen Main Quarry, South Africa.” The authors are Jesse M. Martin, who leads the study, A. B. Leece, Stephanie Baker, Andy Herries and David S. Strait, drawn from La Trobe University, the University of Johannesburg, the University of the Witwatersrand and Washington University. The paper is open access at the publisher’s full-text page, so readers can check the specimen descriptions for themselves.
The La Trobe account, republished by ScienceDaily on Oct. 8, 2026, counts 18 newly described hominin fossils and does not give a per-species split. An earlier distribution of the announcement, carried by a media wire page dated Sept. 30, shows the news predates the ScienceDaily repost by more than a week. The primary date, then, is the end of September, and the October pickups followed it.
The count of 18 refers to fossils newly described in this paper, not to everything the quarry has yielded since 1992, and the paper’s title says the material is cranial and mandibular, meaning pieces of skulls and jaws. Described in text, that is the only level of detail the public summaries support, and the paper is the place to find which of the 18 belong to which species and how each was recovered.
Why DNH 127 counts as unusually early
The specimen that carries the claim is the adult. ScienceDaily quotes Martin on the main point: “This paper publishes a new adult fossil attributed to Homo erectus, DNH 127.” The specimen is about 2 million years old, which puts it roughly 200,000 years older than adult Homo erectus from Dmanisi, a Georgian site dated to around 1.8 million years ago. It is the first adult of the species recovered at Drimolen. The only earlier Homo erectus individual from the cave, called DNH 134 and described in 2020, was a child aged about two to four years, according to IFLScience’s coverage.
Martin put the broader meaning in a sentence reported by the media wire: “Drimolen preserves evidence for the first appearance of this species 2 million years ago.” Neither page names the dating method behind the 2-million-year figure, so the age is best read as the research team’s stated estimate until the paper’s methods are consulted.
Adulthood is what makes the comparison possible. The earlier Drimolen individual was a young child, and the Dmanisi fossils the team measured the new specimen against are adults, so DNH 127 is the first Drimolen example of the species that can be set beside them on equal terms. The 200,000-year gap is the result of that comparison. IFLScience adds that Martin described the paper as further confirmation that the species first appeared in southern Africa 2 million years ago, which frames the find as a statement about where and when the lineage began rather than only a single skull.
A cave dominated by Paranthropus robustus
Homo erectus was the minority at Drimolen. Martin reported that Paranthropus robustus, a species with heavy chewing anatomy, outnumbered Homo erectus there by more than 10 to one about 2 million years ago. That ratio applies to Drimolen only, and it describes what was recovered from this one quarry rather than the population of southern Africa at the time.
The Paranthropus material carries its own result. According to the ScienceDaily account, Drimolen’s Paranthropus robustus had smaller teeth and chewing muscles than later specimens from Swartkrans, a cave dated to about 1.8 million years ago, which the researchers read as change over roughly 200,000 years. Swartkrans sits within the Fossil Hominid Sites of South Africa that UNESCO inscribed as a World Heritage property in 1999, along with Sterkfontein and Kromdraai. The team had already proposed the subspecies name Paranthropus robustus ukusa for the Drimolen population, and the new fossils support that proposal.
Several questions stay open from the available write-ups. The method used to date DNH 127 is not named on the pages reviewed, the division of the 18 fossils between the two species is not stated, and the secondary coverage cannot show how the specimens were first assigned to species. The paper itself is the place those answers sit, and its authors are the people who can say how firmly a 2-million-year age for an adult Homo erectus holds against the Dmanisi record.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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