This stuff I picked out isn't the full story, just what I picked out... http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/351846/description/Notorious_Bones
Almost 2 million years ago in what’s now South Africa, a boy and a woman fell through a hole in the ground into an underground cave, tumbling about 50 meters to their deaths.
Now the fallen Stone Age kid and his elder have plunged into a long-standing scientific dispute about the evolutionary roots of the Homo genus, a group of upright-walking, large-brained species that led directly to people today. Researchers generally agree that small-brained members of the human evolutionary family, known as australopithecines, evolved into the first representative of the Homo line between 3 million and 2 million years ago.
But so few fossils dating to that stretch of time have been unearthed that the era of early Homo evolution is considered a “muddle in the middle” of the hominid family tree.
Berger takes two big swipes at status quo thinking about Homo evolution with his analysis of the Malapa fossils. First, he nominates A. sediba as the most likely ancestor of the first Homo species. Forget the popular notion that the Homo genus arose in East Africa. Southern Africa was where the evolutionary action was, Berger contends.
Second, he rejects previous contentions that a handful of fragmentary, mainly East African skull and jaw fossils dating to as early as 2.4 million years ago belong to the Homo line. A. sediba features an odd mix of humanlike and apelike skeletal traits. Considering only skull, hand and hip fossils, it would have been easy to misclassify the Malapa discoveries as a Homo species, Berger says. The same danger applies to the East African finds, in his view.
Berger and his collaborators never would have predicted that hominids living in southern Africa almost 2 million years ago were put together like the two Malapa individuals. Neither would any other researcher.
A. sediba possessed a brain only slightly larger than a chimpanzee’s. Adult members of the ancient species reached heights intermediate between full-grown people and chimps. Yet the Malapa skulls also display Homo-like traits such as small front teeth, rounded brain cases and narrow faces with slight chins.
By 2 million years ago, several lines of hominids with various humanlike traits had emerged in eastern and southern Africa, says anthropologist Christopher Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London. Only one of those groups could have carved out a path to the Homo genus. He doubts it was A. sediba.
Where in Africa Homo originated is far more mysterious than Little Foot’s age, Clarke says. Though fossils of 3-million- to 2-million-year-old African hominids come almost exclusively from eastern and southern parts of the continent, he observes, “the Homo genus could have first developed in central Africa for all we know.”
Side Note:
The new paper was spurred by the discovery of several 120,000-year-old tools at a desert archaeological site in the United Arab Emirates.
The presence of the tools—whose design is uniquely African, experts say—so early in the region suggests early humans marched out of Africa into the Arabian Peninsula directly from the Horn of Africa, roughly present-day Somalia (map). Previously, scientists had thought humans first left via the Nile Valley or the Far East. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/...arly-humans-left-science-climate-stone-tools/
Almost 2 million years ago in what’s now South Africa, a boy and a woman fell through a hole in the ground into an underground cave, tumbling about 50 meters to their deaths.
Now the fallen Stone Age kid and his elder have plunged into a long-standing scientific dispute about the evolutionary roots of the Homo genus, a group of upright-walking, large-brained species that led directly to people today. Researchers generally agree that small-brained members of the human evolutionary family, known as australopithecines, evolved into the first representative of the Homo line between 3 million and 2 million years ago.
But so few fossils dating to that stretch of time have been unearthed that the era of early Homo evolution is considered a “muddle in the middle” of the hominid family tree.
Berger takes two big swipes at status quo thinking about Homo evolution with his analysis of the Malapa fossils. First, he nominates A. sediba as the most likely ancestor of the first Homo species. Forget the popular notion that the Homo genus arose in East Africa. Southern Africa was where the evolutionary action was, Berger contends.
Second, he rejects previous contentions that a handful of fragmentary, mainly East African skull and jaw fossils dating to as early as 2.4 million years ago belong to the Homo line. A. sediba features an odd mix of humanlike and apelike skeletal traits. Considering only skull, hand and hip fossils, it would have been easy to misclassify the Malapa discoveries as a Homo species, Berger says. The same danger applies to the East African finds, in his view.
Berger and his collaborators never would have predicted that hominids living in southern Africa almost 2 million years ago were put together like the two Malapa individuals. Neither would any other researcher.
A. sediba possessed a brain only slightly larger than a chimpanzee’s. Adult members of the ancient species reached heights intermediate between full-grown people and chimps. Yet the Malapa skulls also display Homo-like traits such as small front teeth, rounded brain cases and narrow faces with slight chins.
By 2 million years ago, several lines of hominids with various humanlike traits had emerged in eastern and southern Africa, says anthropologist Christopher Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London. Only one of those groups could have carved out a path to the Homo genus. He doubts it was A. sediba.
Where in Africa Homo originated is far more mysterious than Little Foot’s age, Clarke says. Though fossils of 3-million- to 2-million-year-old African hominids come almost exclusively from eastern and southern parts of the continent, he observes, “the Homo genus could have first developed in central Africa for all we know.”
Side Note:
The new paper was spurred by the discovery of several 120,000-year-old tools at a desert archaeological site in the United Arab Emirates.
The presence of the tools—whose design is uniquely African, experts say—so early in the region suggests early humans marched out of Africa into the Arabian Peninsula directly from the Horn of Africa, roughly present-day Somalia (map). Previously, scientists had thought humans first left via the Nile Valley or the Far East. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/...arly-humans-left-science-climate-stone-tools/