"I imagine there might be some though who will be skeptical -- as is always the case." Their argument centers on a timeline: The oldest known Homo fossil, a jawbone, is dated at 2.8 million years old, ...

Composite reconstruction of Australopithecus sediba, based on remains from three individuals found at the site of Malapa in South Africa. Image: Courtesy of Lee R. Berger and the University of the ...

An ancient human relative was able to walk the ground on two legs and use their upper limbs to climb and swing like apes, according to a new study of 2 million-year-old vertebrae fossils. An ...

When studying how fossil hominids moved, researchers usually analyze the morphology of bones—which is crucial for understanding the evolution of bipedalism—focusing mainly on muscle insertion sites.

The fossil site of Malapa in the Cradle of Humankind, South Africa, discovered by Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in August 2008, has been one of the most productive ...

Spinal bones of an extinct human relative have been found in lumps of rock blasted out of a South African cave and used to reconstruct one of the most complete back fossils of any hominin. The spine ...

The recovery of new lumbar vertebrae from the lower back of a single individual of the human relative, Australopithecus sediba, and portions of other vertebrae of the same female from Malapa, South ...

Sometime around 2 million years ago, a group of bipedal hominins in Eastern Africa gradually evolved into something that looked and acted enough like us to be part of our genus, Homo. This was an ...

A diagram of how the skeletons of Australopithecus sediba came to be preserved in the Malapa cave deposit. From Dirks et al, 2010. A little less than two million years ago, in what is now South Africa ...

Everybody knows "Lucy." For nearly four decades, this famous partial skeleton of Australopithecus afarensis, dated to 3.2 million years ago, has been an ambassador for our prehistoric past, and her ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American Now, I can already hear the protests of more ...