The Bear Minimum

In the Cradle of Life, to be specific.

Let me set the scene for you. A palaeoanthropologist and his son have set out on the very first day of their trip to the South African region known as The Cradle of Life: A place known for being a repository for many, many ancient human fossils. A few minutes into an area that they’d designated as a likely ‘hot-spot’ using the Virtual Globe software in Google Earth, the son turns over a rock to see what he thinks might be a length of white antelope bone. He calls over his father, and within a few minutes the father is swearing. The son asks “What is it? What did I do?” The father replies, “Nothing! Nothing, you found a Hominid!”

The boy had found the clavicle of the newly named Australopithecus sediba, a formerly unknown ancestor in humanity’s family tree. Before the finding of A. sediba there was almost no known fossil examples from around 1.8 to 2 million years ago in our evolutionary history, which is why these two skeletons, of a mature female and a juvenile male, are so important.

What’s also very interesting about this case is that the scientists who discovered the fossils have grouped them in with the Australopithecus rather than the Homo group of ancestors. What this means is that they think these Hominids are further away from us in terms of evolution, yet there are Homo species in other parts of Africa which have been dated as living longer ago than this new A. sediba.

Another fascinating aspect of the A. sediba is that the skeleton shows us a different version of evolution than scientists had previously speculated. The legs are long like ours, and the pelvis is highly developed, which means that A. sediba walked on their hind legs like us, however their arms are comparitively very long, like that of an orangutan, which means they would have been very able in trees, also. The brain cavity is small, too, like that of the Australopithecus, but it seems that that trait alone is what is holding it up from being considered closer kin, and therefore of the Homo species. In my personal opinion it won’t be too long before the Australopithecus sediba is re-named as the Homo sediba, but is just my take on the situation.