S.Africa officially announces new hominid species, A. sediba

[Radojica]

The discovery of a new hominid species has been officially announced at the Cradle of Humankind site near Johannesburg by South African Vice President Kgalema Motlanthe.
Krugersdorp, South Africa - Speaking on South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC)’s channel 3, he said:

We will be able to add yet another fascinating layer in the answer to the question, ”Where do I come from.”

The full results are to be published in the journal Science. According to The Times the researchers felt it fills an important gap between older hominids and the species Homo, which includes modern humans.
The species, which looks like the earlier, ape-like human ancestors, is to be called Australopithecus sediba after the Sotho word for ”natural spring.”
The man whose son made the actual discovery, Professor Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg said:

These fossils give us an extraordinarily detailed look into a new chapter of human evolution and provide a window into a critical period when hominids made the committed change from dependency on life in the trees to life on the ground. Australopithecus sediba appears to present a mosaic of features demonstrating an animal comfortable in both worlds.

Berger said A. sediba's mosaic of features could become a sort of Rosetta stone that helps to unlock the secret of how the genus Homo evolved.
The find consists of an adult female and a juvenile, each about 1,27 metres (about four feet) tall. The female would have weighed some 33 kilograms (about 73 pounds) and the child 27 kilos.
The skeletons show long forearms and small, powerful hands, but with more human-like facial features than other Australopithicenes.
The pair might have died together, according to SABC 3. They lived between 1,78 and 1,95 million years ago.


http://www.digitaljournal.com/articl...ribute=&local=

[Tabiti]

Obsessed about ancestors, eh?

[Cato]

Science seems to pull yet another "human ancestor" or "hominid" out of its ass just about every week now. Good thing it's named Sediba and not Piltdown.

How many stinking variations on australopithecines can be magicked up from a few miserable old bones anyways?

[Sadie]

Once Oghren is right. All of this is sheer idiocy.

Has something to do with wanking over ancestors.

[Lulletje Rozewater]

Science seems to pull yet another "human ancestor" or "hominid" out of its ass just about every week now. Good thing it's named Sediba and not Piltdown.

How many stinking variations on australopithecines can be magicked up from a few miserable old bones anyways?

I live about 2 km from the place and with regard to Lee Berger,ah well he is a
Magician pulling rabbits out of a hat just before 2010.
I no way could he decide whether this thing and the Taung child are in the line of homo sapiens sapiens or just a dead end.
I do not trust Lee Berger nor Prof Tobias and this applies too to the character from Australia with a Dutch accent(forgotten the name).
It is a good ad for 2010 and the kaffirs,by Sephardic jews such as Berger and Tobias.Jews here are so up the ANC ass.
Every homonid wandering down to the South are in principle dead end,those wandering up north are giving rise to the Erectus.

The classification is causing fierce disagreement among palaeontologists, however. “To claim that these new fossils represent an ancestor of living humans is misleading and founded in error,” said Darren Curnoe, of University of New South Wales. The species was too primitive to be an ancestor of Homo, he said

by Darren Curnoe, of University of New South Wales. see Times in article.

[Cato]

I live about 2 km from the place and with regard to Lee Berger,ah well he is a
Magician pulling rabbits out of a hat just before 2010.
I no way could he decide whether this thing and the Taung child are in the line of homo sapiens sapiens or just a dead end.
I do not trust Lee Berger nor Prof Tobias and this applies too to the character from Australia with a Dutch accent(forgotten the name).
It is a good ad for 2010 and the kaffirs,by Sephardic jews such as Berger and Tobias.Jews here are so up the ANC ass.
Every homonid wandering down to the South are in principle dead end,those wandering up north are giving rise to the Erectus.

by Darren Curnoe, of University of New South Wales. see Times in article.

Wikipedia lists six types of Australopithecus: A. afarensis, A. africanus, A. anamensis, A. bahrelghazali, A. garhi, A. sediba. This in addition to some other creatures, formerly Australopithecus types, but now renamed Paranthropus: P. aethiopicus, P. robustus, P. boisei.

That's nine, or potentially nine, types of a pretty unimpressive species of knuckledraggers as far as I'm concerned. Hooray Africa! up

[Cato]

I'm just sick of these kinds of critters being called human ancestors when they could, as Kleitrapper mentioned, be evolutionary dead ends. Or, as I think, they're something of an anthropological cryptid- as definable as a given scientist wants to make them as they pour over a shoddy collection of incomplete bones. They remind me more of chimpanzees or bonobos than anything else: small, bandy-legged little critters that walked about on two legs (like chimps/bonobos are capable of).

These extinct African hairbags mean as much to me as the Precambrian splooge that the first unicellular lifeforms supposedly emerged from- very little in other words.

[Lulletje Rozewater]

I'm just sick of these kinds of critters being called human ancestors when they could, as Kleitrapper mentioned, be evolutionary dead ends. Or, as I think, they're something of an anthropological cryptid- as definable as a given scientist wants to make them as they pour over a shoddy collection of incomplete bones. They remind me more of chimpanzees or bonobos than anything else: small, bandy-legged little critters that walked about on two legs (like chimps/bonobos are capable of).

These extinct African hairbags mean as much to me as the Precambrian splooge that the first unicellular lifeforms supposedly emerged from- very little in other words.

I spend some time with Richard Leakey in Kenya.
He lambasted Prof Tobias with his so called line of evolution.


We are not descended from the apes,both are branch offs

[Cato]

I spend some time with Richard Leakey in Kenya.
He lambasted Prof Tobias with his so called line of evolution.


We are not descended from the apes,both are branch offs

To me, there is no straight line in human evolution given that there's only one human species, sapiens, as a means of measurement and comparison.

Sometimes I feel that it's a matter of a sort of existential self-hate, that is that sapiens aren't so unique after all and science has found the bones of some creature called the "Hobbit" to prove it (or some other "new" variation on archaic hominids that gets "discovered"). I think what I'd call crank science is involved, sapiens are assumed to have come out of darkest Africa, and any fugly chimpoid like Lucy and the Taung Child that's dug up gets carted out as being a "human ancestor" when it's probably just a fugly chimpoid.

Skeletons:



I guess it's sort of assumed that australopithecus had complete bipedal locomotion rather than being a partial knuckle-walker like a chimp. With erectus, you can see its got longer limbs and such, a more expanded skeletal structure, etc. And from what I recall the earliest specimens of homo, habilis, were supposed to have been around when there were still australopithecines shuffling about in Africa.

I wouldn't be so quick to call an australopithecus a "human ancestor" when it's probably just a genetic relative of our earliest ancestors like habilis (i.e. relative to the relationship of sapiens and chimps).