Digging at Drimolen began in 1992. It is a sediment-filled cave in the Cradle of Humankind, the valley north-west of Johannesburg that has yielded many of South Africa's oldest human fossils. Some of its fossils stayed in drawers, unpublished and closed to other researchers.
Eighteen of those pieces now have a description. Jesse Martin and A. B. Leece of La Trobe University in Melbourne describe them with Stephanie Baker, Andy Herries and David Strait of the universities of Johannesburg, the Witwatersrand and Washington in St. Louis. The paper was published on 25 September 2026 in Annals of Human Biology, open access. The work is funded by the Australian Research Council.
They are fragments of skull and jaw excavated between 1992 and 2019. Fourteen belong to Paranthropus robustus, a hominin with huge molars and powerful chewing muscles that lived in South Africa from roughly two million to one million years ago. Three remain indeterminate, hominins that cannot be assigned to a genus or species. Only one is Homo erectus. It is catalogued as DNH 127.
The press release, and the headlines that followed it, say Homo erectus appeared 200,000 years earlier than thought. The paper says something else. According to its abstract, DNH 127 provides additional evidence for Homo erectus in South Africa between 2.04 and 1.95 million years ago. The word that matters is additional.

The presence of Homo erectus at Drimolen around two million years ago was published before. The same group proposed it in Science in 2020, in a paper with Herries as first author and Martin as second. Its title states the thesis: Australopithecus, Paranthropus and early Homo erectus lived in South Africa at the same time. The fossil then, the press release recalls, was DNH 134, the skull of a child aged two to four. The new paper lists DNH 134 among the crania already described.
The press release's 200,000 years come from a different comparison. It calls DNH 127 the first adult Homo erectus found at Drimolen and sets it beside the adults from Dmanisi, in Georgia, dated to about 1.8 million years. The abstract mentions neither the individual's age nor Dmanisi. The full text could not be read.

The firmest result concerns the other hominin. The authors compare the Drimolen Paranthropus with two younger samples from other South African sites, labelled SM1HR and KBM4-6. They report a new jaw trait that may set the Drimolen population apart. The morphology, they write, is compatible with a distinct population. The press release goes further and speaks of a subspecies, Paranthropus robustus ukusa. The abstract does not name it.
Then there is the ratio between the two species. The press release says Paranthropus outnumbered Homo erectus at Drimolen by more than ten to one. In the paper's sample the ratio is fourteen to one. But a fossil count is not a census. What ends up in a cave depends on the predators that drag prey into it, on rock falls and on which bones survive best. A ratio of fossils tells us which remains have reached us.
What remains is the picture Drimolen has drawn for years. Two million years ago, in the same valley, two human lineages lived by opposite strategies. Paranthropus bet on teeth and a brain only slightly larger than a chimpanzee's. Homo erectus had smaller molars and a growing brain. One lineage died out. We descend from the other.
The paper settles a debt with the field. Fossils dug up more than thirty years ago can now be compared by anyone. That is the real merit of a descriptive paper, and the press release does not mention it.

References
Martin J. M., Leece A. B., Baker S., Herries A. I. R., Strait D. S., "New hominin cranial and mandibular remains from Drimolen Main Quarry, South Africa", Annals of Human Biology, 53, 1, 2725046, 25 September 2026, open access (CC BY 4.0; abstract read). doi: 10.1080/03014460.2026.2725046
Herries A. I. R., Martin J. M., Leece A. B., Adams J. W., Boschian G. et al., "Contemporaneity of Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and early Homo erectus in South Africa", Science, 368, 6486, eaaw7293, 3 April 2020. doi: 10.1126/science.aaw7293
La Trobe University, press release carried by ScienceDaily on 7 October 2026 (used as a tip and, where stated in the text, as an attributed source).

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