By Bruce Bower
Newly discovered fossils provide the closest look yet at an anatomically quirky, 2 million-year-old member of the human evolutionary family. Discoverers of the ancient bones suspect they come from a species that served as an evolutionary bridge from relatively apelike ancestors to the Homo genus, which includes modern people.
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Four papers published in the Sept. 9 Science describe a mosaic of humanlike and apelike skeletal traits on Australopithecus sediba, a recently proposed hominid species found at South Africa’s Malapa cave site (SN: 5/8/10, p. 14). Dates for newly exposed cave sediments, presented in a fifth paper in the same issue of Science, indicate that A. sediba lived there 1.977 million years ago, give or take several thousand years.
An international team led by anthropologist Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, views the new findings as consistent with its previous suggestion that A. sediba fossils at Malapa represent late-surviving members of a hominid line that gave rise to Homo.