 |
| from Berger et al, 2010 |
When Lee Berger took the dirt track he had ignored in seasons past, he found something remarkable in an abandoned miner's pit on August 1, 2008. He was not looking for gems or even limestone. He was looking for hominid bones, and he struck a 'glory hole' of ancient remains at Malapa. Two partial skeletons, one adult female (MH2) and one young male(MH1), of what is a new species of Australopithecine,
Australopithecus sediba, dated to 1.977m years old (~2,000) were recovered. So far, more than 220 bones have been removed by Berger and his associates from the Malapa site. Berger is sure there are more hominid bones to be found since full scale excavations have not yet begun. It appears that many animals and hominins met their end at Malapa trying to reach water deep in a crevice in the earth. Malapa means "homestead" in the Sesotho language and represents Berger's belief that
A. sediba is the oldest direct ancestor of man yet found.
One of creationists' chief criticism of evolution, one that has been around since Darwin wrote
The Decent of Man, has been the lack of fossil evidence of intermediary forms.
A. sediba is an important fossil find because it possesses a mosaic of traits, some of which are common to our own genus
Homoand some of which are more primitive and common to
Australopithecus.
 |
| credit: Mauricio Anton |
The fossils are the right age to be an intermediary form on the human lineage. Paleoanthropologists generally place the rise of the human genus
Homo at about 2 million years ago with
Homo habilis the first representative of the new genus that includes
Homo sapiens. However, Berger's assessment of the new fossils is
controversial because it relegates H. habilis to an evolutionary dead end instead of it being the ancestor of
H. erectus, currently thought to be the first true human species.
A. sediba [artist's impression] shares the small body size, long arms, and small brian of Australopiths, but it also exhibits the small teeth, developed cranium, dexterous hands, and bowl shaped hips of early Homos. Exactly were the new find fits into the evolution of man will required more investigation, but what can be said about
A. Sediba now is that it answers the creationists' question of where are the intermediate forms of the "man-ape"? Some of them lie entombed 40 kms northwest of Johannesburg, South Africa, awaiting discovery by their progenitors.
