by KATE WONG
“Two partial skeletons of Australopithecus sediba were unveiled to the public in 2010. The one on the left represents an adult female, the one on the right a juvenile male nicknamed Karabo.” PHOTO/Lee Berger
Readers of this blog may have noticed that I’m obsessed with a recently discovered member of the human family tree: the nearly two million-year-old Australopithecus sediba, discovered at a site called Malapa near Johannesburg. There are several reasons for this fixation. For one thing it’s new—it isn’t every day that a previously unknown human relative comes to light, and this one may bear on the mysterious origin of our own genus, Homo. For another, the fossils are extraordinarily well-preserved and include features that have never been seen before in fossils this old, including tartar and probable skin. And third, it is abundantly clear that much more material remains to be recovered from Malapa, which I visited last fall. It’s a paleoanthropological jackpot.
“CT-scanning of this large rock from the site of Malapa in Johannesburg revealed bones that may belong to the Karabo skeleton.” PHOTO/Lee Berger
Scientific American for more