New hominid discovered by nine-year-old - Australopithecus sediba

Let there be no more grousing about Take Your Kid to Work Day. When paleoanthropologist Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa took his son, Matthew, then 9, to the site near the Malapa caves north of Johannesburg where he and his team were hunting fossils in 2008, the boy wandered about 45 feet away from everyone else. After about a minute and a half, Matthew picked up a rock and called out, "Dad, I found a fossil!"

Berger assumed it was one of the common antelope fossils that litter the site, but when he strolled over to look at the rock Matthew was holding, he got the shock of his life...

Two partial skeletons unearthed from a cave in South Africa belong to a previously unclassified species of hominid that is shedding new light on the evolution of our own species, Homo sapiens, researchers say. The newly documented species, called Australopithecus sediba, was an upright walker that shared many physical traits with the earliest known Homo species—and its introduction into the fossil record might answer some key questions about what it means to be human.

The fossils are between 1.95 and 1.78 million years old, and in this week’s issue of Science, two reports describe both the physical characteristics of this new Australopithecus species as well as the ancient environment in which it lived and died. The emerging picture is one of a hominid with a bone structure similar to the earliest Homo species, but who employed it more as an Australopithecus, like the famed “Lucy,” would have.

These new fossils, however, represent a hominid that appeared approximately 1 million years later than Lucy, and their features imply that the transition from earlier hominids to the Homo genus occurred in very slow stages, with various Homo-like species emerging first.
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http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/20...p_fossil.shtml

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Many experts believe the human genus Homo evolved from the Australopithecus genus about 2 million years ago. One of the best-known pre-humans is "Lucy," the skeleton of a species called Australopithecus afarensis, and this new species is about 1 million years younger than "Lucy," the scientists said.

The fossils, a juvenile male and an adult female, were found in the Malapa caves in the "Cradle of Humankind" World Heritage Site, 40 km (25 miles) outside Johannesburg.

The species had long arms, like an ape, short powerful hands, a very advanced pelvis and long legs capable of striding and possibly running like a human, the researchers said.

The scientists estimate both hominids were about 1.27 meters, although the child would have grown taller.

The brain size of the younger one was probably between 420 and 450 cubic centimeters, which is small when compared with the human brain of about 1200 to 1600 cubic centimeters, they said.
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