ABOVE: Fossil casts of Australopithecus afarensis (left), Homo habilis (center), and Australopithecus sediba (right)
MATT WOOD, UCHICAGO
Over the last decade, some paleontologists have proposed that a tree-climbing, bipedal species whose fossils were found in South Africa was an ancestor of humans. But a new analysis, published yesterday (May 8) in Science Advances, finds that scenario to be “highly unlikely,” given that the only fossils of Australopithecus sediba are 800,000 years younger than the oldest Homo specimen.
The authors say the result supports the idea that the now-extinct hominin A. afarensis is probably the true ancestor of humans.
“I had no doubt in my mind—nor did many in our field—that A. sediba could not have been the ancestor of Homo, not only because the earliest known representative of Homo is 800,000 years older, but also because A. sediba does not have all of the morphological features that one would expect to ...
