Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, February 9, 1995                   TAG: 9502090086
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-11   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: NEW YORK                                 LENGTH: Medium

JAW COULD BE AS OLD AS 1.9 MILLION YEARS

A jaw found in the former Soviet republic of Georgia may be the oldest trace of humankind's closest ancestors ever found outside Africa.

The finding, which one expert called spectacular, provides new evidence that an ancestor called Homo erectus left Africa earlier than scientists had long thought, and it raises a mystery about what happened later.

The Homo erectus lower jaw, with teeth, was found in 1991 in the Georgian republic, northeast of Turkey. Georgian researchers now report that it appears to be 1.6 million to 1.8 million years old, based on the age of nearby rock and animal fossils.

Last year, other researchers announced that an erectus fossil found on the Indonesian island of Java was 1.8 million years old. But that date has been questioned, and in any case, the Georgian fossil might even be 1.9 million years old, an American expert said.

The Georgian fossil is about a million years older than any widely accepted prehuman remains in Europe, the researchers said. And that presents a puzzle: If erectus had migrated from Africa to Georgia by 1.8 million or so years ago, why didn't it just keep on going and move into Europe?

The jaw is described in today's issue of the journal Nature by Leo Gabunia and Absolon Vekua at the Georgian Academy of Sciences in Tbilisi. They said it might be the oldest evidence outside Africa of the evolutionary group called Homo, which includes modern humans and close ancestors.

Eric Delson, the American anthropologist who said the jaw might be as much as 1.9 million years old, cautioned that the jaw's age is still uncertain.

Other experts were split on the age.

G. Philip Rightmire, a professor of anthropology at the State University of New York at Binghamton, said he thought the jaw might be only 900,000 to 1 million years old.

But Henry McHenry, anthropology professor at the University of California, Davis, said animal fossils found along with the jaw convince him that the jaw is as old as the Georgian researchers say.

``It's really quite a spectacular discovery,'' McHenry said.

If the jaw is around 1.8 million years old, it adds to evidence from the Java finding that Homo erectus migrated out of Africa a bit less than 2 million years ago. That's about a half-million years or more earlier than scientists had previously thought.