Remains of ancient Australopithecus hominins from the Sterkfontein caves in South Africa—including the well-known “Mrs. Ples”—were originally dated to between 2.1 and 2.6 million years ago, but they are actually between 3.4 and 3.6 million years old, a study estimates. The revised dates, published in PNAS on Monday (June 27), would mean they’re older than the famous Lucy fossil unearthed in Ethiopia, which is dated to around 3.2 million years ago, reports The Washington Post.
“This important new dating work pushes the age of some of the most interesting fossils in human evolution research, and one of South Africa’s most iconic fossils, Mrs. Ples, back a million years to a time when, in East Africa, we find other iconic early hominins like Lucy,” study coauthor Dominic Stratford tells the Post.
The archeological community has widely accepted the hypothesis that the early hominin species Australopithecus africanus (e.g. Mrs. Ples) descended from ...
