Most people have heard of at least one early species closely related to modern humans: the humble Neanderthal, a widespread species that shared this planet with our early ancestors and even crossbred with them so that many modern humans have at least some percentage of Neanderthal DNA in their genes.

But there were actually many other species of early hominids, and it’s possible that scientists are discovering more all the time.

Unless you spend a lot of time in anthropology circles, you may be ignorant of most other early hominids. There is an entire genus, Australopithecus, with many different species, that was the predecessor to the genus of Homo, from which our own species emerged.

Modern humans are generally accepted to be a species called Homo sapiens sapiens. The repetition is on purpose, meant to help classify other archaic species of early human such as Neanderthals and Denisovans as a subspecies of Homo sapiens (rather than, for example, Homo Neanderthalis).

But there may be many other early examples of Homo species.

New researching being done in the Republic of Georgia has uncovered a variety of hominid fossils that are apparently the oldest ever to be found outside of Africa, up to 1.8 million years ago.

Though the first example of this species was uncovered back in 1991, a new paper may reveal more examples of this creature, who has enough disparate properties from Homo erectus that it may constitute an entirely new entry into our ancestry: Homo georgicus.

“In our phylogenetic analyses, none of the Dmanisi hominins form a sister taxon to either H. erectus or H. ergaster,” they theorize in their paper, going on to claim that the “Dmanisi hominins did not share a unique common ancestor with H. erectus or H. ergaster, and we cannot support their attribution to either of those species.”

The paper is not yet published, but a pre-publication version is available online.

Our human history may have many more bends and curves than we thought.

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about a quantum computer simulation that has “reversed time” and physics may never be the same.