Thread: 2-million-year-old fossils offer look at human evolution

The middle-aged woman and the young boy, perhaps her son or simply another member of her tribe, were out hunting on the African plains or maybe looking for water in the midst of a drought when they fell into a sinkhole, dying almost instantly.

Shortly thereafter, a monsoon or a flood washed them into a deeper basin, where they were covered with mud and rapidly fossilized.

In 2008, nearly 2 million years later, another boy, 9-year-old Matthew Berger, discovered part of their skeletons outside the Malapa cave north of Johannesburg, South Africa, a find that experts have dubbed one of the most important of recent times.

2-million-year-old fossils offer look at human evolution - latimes.com


Someone go find LP for me dangit!

Cool. It's in South Africa too, thousands of miles from the Rift Valley where many previous finds were made.

What a great find. There is also a reference to other skeletons, so there may be more to come.

The lower limbs and the pelvis of the creatures, which the team has christened Australopithecus sediba, indicate that they easily walked upright. ("Australopithecus" means southern ape, and "sediba" is Sotho for natural spring, fountain or wellspring.) The long arms, however, indicate that they still climbed trees. Despite the name, then, "this is very different from australopithecines," Berger said.

There is some speculation among anthropologists that intelligence followed walking upright, as walking on two legs leaves two more limbs for manipulating the environment, making tools, carrying things around. Not only that, but it's easier to support a larger brain if the neck is not held out horizontally.

That last was on NOVA, or maybe on Discover, I'm not sure.

Originally Posted by bowerbird

It is looking more and more as if intelligence evolved not once but several times over the millennia

Do you think it will make a comeback, or was it just an evolutionary dead end?

Originally Posted by EnigmaO01

Why didn't anyone respond when I posted it? :glare:

http://politicalprops.org/forum/f33/...volution-1190/

Because you didn't incorporate paragraph breaks in your post?

(My bad.. guess I missed it :P )