By Bruce Bower
She was short, squat and definitely not built for speed. On the plus side, this adult female Homo erectus, who lived in Africa roughly one million years ago, had hips wide enough to bear babies with brains nearly as big as those of newborn human infants.
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That’s the evolutionary picture presented by researchers who have unearthed a rare find: a nearly complete female H. erectus pelvis. Pieces of the fossil were found at an Ethiopian site called Gona in 2001 and 2003.
H. erectus females evolved a pelvis of a size unprecedented among human ancestors because the females had to squeeze increasingly big-headed babies through their birth canals, concludes a team led by anthropologists Scott Simpson of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and Sileshi Semaw of Indiana University in Bloomington.