Scientists Discover Bag-Like Creature As Human Ancestor

When the Earth was newly formed, there were no vertebrates or apes. In fact, most of the species here started out small. Human ancestry began with miniscule species that are not nearly as developed as they are now.

Scientists recently discovered that humans' "primitive" ancestors were, in fact, very primitive indeed. Way before the apes and the sapiens, there are less complex species humans are related to. Surprisingly, they are sea creatures only a millimeter in size, bag-like and most likely lacking parts, including the glaring lack of an anus, as Fox News pointed out.

The study, published in the journal Nature on Monday, gave a name for the species -- Saccorhytus coronaries. It is said to be a 540-million-year-old member of deuterostomes, which are a category of animal species that are said to have given rise to vertebrates.

Simon Conway Morris shared with BBC that, "All deuterostomes had a common ancestor, and we think that is what we are looking at here." What scientists were looking at, however, is a bag-like creature, with a prominent mouth and folds. At its age, it is also considered the oldest of its species, as scientists only previously discovered deuterostome groups at 520 million years old, at the most. At this point in time, deuterostome groups have already started to diversify themselves.

What is especially interesting about this newly discovered species is that researchers were unable to find evidence of the animal ever having an anus, which suggested that it consumed food and excreted them in the same opening. This is only one of the many insights that the animals gave.

Degan Shu of the Northwest University in Xi'An, Shaanxi Province, noted that these species may be the first in the early stages of evolution. This means that it was not only ancestors to the fishes, starfish and sea urchins but to humans as well.