Photograph by Brent Stirton, Art by John Gurche
Posted on 07/26/2011 7:46:44 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
The first two skeletons removed from the pit were a young adolescent male, 12 or 13 years old, and an adult female. Berger, a paleoanthropologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and his colleagues made the announcement in April 2010. The site, an eroded limestone cave called Malapa, is in a region already so famous for its ancient human fossils that it is often referred to as the Cradle of Humankind. Much of that reputation rests on finds from the early 1900s, back when South Africa harbored the best evidence for early human evolution, including Australopithecus africanus, at the time our oldest known ancestor. Beginning in the late 1950s, the epochal finds of the Leakey family in Tanzania and Kenya, followed later by Donald Johanson's celebrated discovery of the 3.2-million-year-old Lucy skeleton in Ethiopia, shifted cradle-bragging rights to East Africa, where they have remained ever since.
Lee Berger thinks the cradle is about to rock again. He believes Malapa may hold the key to one of the most significant, least understood chapters in the human evolutionary journey: the origin of the first species enough like us to be called human -- a member of the genus Homo.
(Excerpt) Read more at ngm.nationalgeographic.com ...
Photograph by Brent Stirton, Art by John Gurche
|
|
|
| GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
|
|
To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list. |
|
|
|
|
"They did it. They really did it!"
Looks like “Michelle My Belle Obama”, does it?
Older than dirt, she is, and just as stupid.
Looks like a really stupid movie, just as the the last “Planet of the Apes” movie was.
When you have a hit movie, unless you’ve got great writers and thinkers, you should never do a sequel (as most have been flops) - Ghostbusters II; most modern Dacula films; Porky’s 2; Superman III; the Kevin Costner “Robin Hood”; the new “The Thing”; the new “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”; etc.
My annual trek to a movie theater is going to be for Cowboys and Aliens.
Did they look at the night sky and wonder?
That's when the evil white hominids invented the SUV.
Knowing Zep’s pattern of putting their names on stuff they didn’t write, these early hominids probably gave us “Stairway to Heaven” and didn’t get credit. ;’)
I wish the National Geographic would stick purely to Geography and skip the pseudo-anthropology they’ve been pushing for decades.
It's not on my list unless I hear some seriously good buzz.
It doesn’t surprise me these were found a long way from Kenya. But then I’m not married to Africa being the sole place human ancestors evolved. It’s just the easiest place to find the fossils.
well put.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
