By: Seth Borenstein, AP Science Writer
WASHINGTON.- In modern times, men explored the New World. But 2 million years earlier, the men among our pre-human forerunners stayed put and it was the women who traveled to start new families, a study of fossil teeth from Africa suggests. The findings, published in Thursday’s journal Nature, indicate females from two pre-human species seemed to move out of their birth homes and journey elsewhere, probably to prevent inbreeding, researchers said. Chimpanzees, our closest living primate relative, also have females that travel to mate and raise families. That’s in contrast to lower primates and most mammals where it is the males that have the wanderlust. Researchers studied 19 teeth, including eight from Australopithecus africanus individuals, a species considered a probable ancestor from about 2.2 million years ago. The other 11 were from Paranthropus robustus individuals, a dead-end species that was not our direct ancestors but more like