australopithecus

Quirks and Quarks18:53Unearthing a small-brained hominid species that challenges human exceptionalismIn 2013 renowned paleoanthropologist Lee Berger sent a couple of cave explorers into a cave system in South Africa to see what they could find. Little did he know they’d return with photos of fossilised hominid remains that would upend everything we thought we knew about what makes us special. He and his colleagues discovered an entirely new species of ancient human relatives, called Homo naledi, that lived a few hundred…

Multiple ancient hominin remains from caves in South Africa may be much, much older than previous estimates suggested.The Sterkfontein limestone cave system, not far from Johannesburg, has yielded so many ancient bones from the hominin genus Australopithecus over the last century that its location has been dubbed the Cradle of Humankind – deeply important to the study of human evolution.  Now, new dating techniques suggest that the remains date back nearly 4 million years – making them even older than the famous…