Above, the Malapa site, September 4th, 2008, at the moment of the discovery of the fossilized female skeleton MH2. Photo courtesy of Lee Berger and the University of the Witwatersrand, under Creative Commons attribution license.
Posted on 09/26/2011 7:20:26 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
His jaw must have dropped when he examined the material before him. It was a rare find. So rare, in fact, that, if what he was looking at was really what he thought it could be, it would be the first and only evidence of soft body tissue from an early hominin ever discovered.......soft tissue from an early (possible) pre-human ancestor nearly 2 million years old. The find was part of the remains uncovered by paleoanthropologist Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand and his colleagues when they discovered fossils of Australopithecus sediba, a possible precursor to our earliest human ancestors (the Homo genus) in the Malapa cave system of South Africa.
"I was standing with Lee in his lab looking at what might be australopithecine skin" said Dr. John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist with the University of Wisconsin - Madison. "I'm not talking about an imprint of skin, like a skin cast. These appear to be thinly layered, possibly mineralized tissue"[1].
The possible mineralized skin tissue was found on top of the skull of the fossil remains of what was identified as a young boy, and on the jaw near the chin of a fossilized woman. Scientists suggest that such surviving evidence is possible because the remains of the individuals found at Malapa were rapidly deposited and entombed in a thick layer of sand and clay through natural causes in a cave or shaft at or soon after their deaths.
(Excerpt) Read more at popular-archaeology.com ...
Above, the Malapa site, September 4th, 2008, at the moment of the discovery of the fossilized female skeleton MH2. Photo courtesy of Lee Berger and the University of the Witwatersrand, under Creative Commons attribution license.
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Can they get intact DNA out of it?
This is really incredible.
It’s mineralized, i.e. it’s a fossil of the skin, also i.e. it’s not likely. But like dino skin, it was previously unknown and long wished for.
that’s because the chronology is not “millions of years”
In before Helen Thomas pics.
I hope that dog doesn’t eat the homework.
If you hold up some soft tissue and say, "This flesh is two million years old", a lot of folks will say, "Cool".
Well, some folks like a fairy tale.
Out of curiosity how did you get your hands on some of the skin and what tests did you run on it to accurately date it?
Amazing.
the individuals found at Malapa were rapidly deposited and entombed in a thick layer of sand and clay through natural causes
"ugh, ooga wogga eee ha dubbawubba"... (Sh!+, we just stepped into quicksand...)
:’D
I like jerky.
"It puts the lotion on"
Radiocarbon dating, Potassium Argon dating, Obsidian Hydration dating, Paleomagnetic and Archaeomagnetic dating, Luminescence, and a whole range of other Isotopic dating methods.
Tastes like chicken.
Slap me some skin. ;)
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