Free Republic

Deep inside a cave 30 miles from Johannesburg, South Africa, a tight crevasse guards the passageway to what was, until recently, the grave of at least 15 human-like individuals. Their bones and teeth—more than 1,500 fragments in all—lay in a heap in the bottom of a pitch-black chamber for ages, until two skinny spelunkers with flashlights squeezed into the earth deep enough to find them. Now those bones are in the hands of scientists who say they belong to a new species of prehumans, with a mix of features typically associated with modern man or fossils belonging to Australopithecina, a...

Sometime between 7-6 million years ago, our primate ancestors stood up and began to walk on two legs. A defining moment along the winding evolutionary roads to becoming human, this is the feature researchers use to distinguish hominins from other apes. Although why it occurred remains an intriguing mystery. By about 2 million years ago, we became fully bipedal, but there were many steps along the path to get us there. Some of these steps still elude our fossil records, but a new study analyzing the remains of a female Australopithecus that researchers nicknamed Issa, has found another. "Issa walked...

A fossil skeleton of a child discovered in a cave system known as the Cradle of Humankind may represent a previously unknown stage in the evolution of man, The (London) Sunday Times reported. The skeleton, which is almost complete despite being two million years old, is believed to belong to one of the hominid groups that includes humans. Hominid fossil finds are usually little more than small bone fragments. Scientists hope such a complete find will help them to work out what our ancestors looked like and to determine key dates in their evolution from ape-man to man-ape. Experts who...

Remarkably well preserved for a two-million-year-old fossil, this child's skull belongs to Australopithecus sediba, a previously unknown species of ape-like creature that may have been a direct ancestor of modern humans, according to a new study in Science. Scientists think this particular Australopithecus sediba fossil is from a male between 8 and 13 years old. The child's fossils were found in the remnants of a subterranean South African cave system alongside the fossil remains of an adult female in her 30s. "It's the opinion of my colleagues and I that [A. sediba] may very well be the Rosetta stone that...

The new species of hominid, the evolutionary branch of primates that includes humans, is to be revealed when the two-million-year-old skeleton of a child is unveiled this week. Scientists believe the almost-complete fossilised skeleton belonged to a previously-unknown type of early human ancestor that may have been a intermediate stage as ape-men evolved into the first species of advanced humans, Homo habilis. Homo habilis lived 2.0-1.6 million years ago and had a wide distribution in Africa Experts who have seen the skeleton say it shares characteristics with Homo habilis, whose emergence 2.5 million years ago is seen as a key...