The university's Anthropology department played a part in the discovery of a new species of an ancient ancestor, the details of which were published in the journal Nature.

These remains are not only helping scientists understand more about how humans evolved, but they also open up the possibility that multiple types of early human ancestors existed at the same time.

Nevada Week Executive Producer Kristen Kidman visited UNLV to learn more.

(Kristen Kidman) In 2018, UNLV Associate Professor of Anthropology Brian Villmoare and a team of international scientists found 13 teeth at a field site in Ethiopia.

(Brian Villmoare) They date to 2.6 million years ago.

They are a new species of Australopithecus.

So before this time in East Africa, Australopithecus was only known up to about 3 million years.

That's Australopithecus afarensis, which is Lucy's species.

-In case you need a quick refresher, the eight levels of classification for species goes like this: domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species.

You're looking at a list of what this looks like for homosapiens, or us.

These fossils are a newly discovered species of Australopithecus, best known for being the genus the famous Lucy skeleton belongs to.

Villmoare says these fossils can help explain some of the timeline of how ancient human ancestors evolved after Lucy, millions of years ago.

-The Australopithecus was kind of a surprise, because we had assumed that after about 3.0 or 2.9 Australopithecus basically couldn't make it.

It seems that they did make it until 2.6, but we have nothing after that.

So just like the last vestige, you know?

-The teeth of this new species were actually discovered with the teeth of another early human ancestor.

-That means that you had two different species that are in two different genera, living at the same place, roughly at the same time.

You can't know if they saw each other.

I mean, it could be seasonal; like in other words, animals do migrate seasonally.

But at least in the coarsest possible terms, they were in the same place at the same time.

-Although scientists only have the teeth of this newly discovered ancestor, Villmoare says there's a lot we can learn from them.

-Like you can really tell a ton about an animal just by looking at his teeth.

It's the way most animals sort of interact with the natural world is by biting it.

So if you have sharp teeth, you're a carnivore.

If you have flat teeth, you're probably grinding something.

If you have big canines, you're using them to fight or to hunt.

So, yeah, the teeth are great.

And so we like the fact that teeth are found.

It would be nice if we found the whole thing in a skull, you know, but that's just, you just sometimes get lucky, and sometimes you don't.

The fossil record gives what it's going to give.

-Villmoare says we often view evolution as a straight line, but discoveries like these show human evolution looks more like a tree with many branches representing the different types of early human species.

-Primates have a lot of different species.

Apes have a lot of different species.

And you shouldn't expect anything else from human evolution.

Now, right now?

Yes, there's only one.

But very recently, as recently as, say, 30,000 years ago, there might have been four or five at the same time on Earth and over, as far as we know, there are, we're up to 26 or 27 different human species over the last 4 million years.

So the fact that we have this newly discovered species, it survived for a while, then went extinct.

We don't think it's any kind of a missing link.

It's probably not ancestral to anything we know of.

That's fine.

That's the way nature works; it experiments.

It says we're going to try this for a while.

Didn't work.

You're now extinct.

And that's what happened to this particular species, we think.

-The teeth are currently with more of the team's discoveries at the National Museum in Ethiopia where other researchers have the opportunity to examine them.

-The way it works is, if you discover a fossil, you sort of have the rights to describe it and do the initial work on it.

Then it becomes the property of the scientific community.

Anyone can go look at our fossils.

All you have to do is just ask the museum.

The museum, as a courtesy, will normally email us and just say somebody wants to look at the fossils.

But our policy is, yeah, absolutely, open door, right?

That's the way science works.

You know?

They need to check to see if what we did was wrong.

You know, scientific knowledge is always provisional.

-The new species does not have a name.

Villmoare says that won't happen until more of its parts are discovered.