A new dating of the Sterkfontein cave, with 500 Australopithecus remains, gives them an age of more than 3 million years.
In the long line of the predecessors of the human race, the australopithecines discovered in South Africa were a bit of a band apart. These small, primitive bipeds, able to walk upright easily but still comfortable in the trees, looked a lot like their East African cousins, the Australopithecus afarensis, the most famous of which is Lucy. But they were supposed to have lived more than 1 million years later, 2.1 to 2.6 million years ago. A huge time lag which, oddly, made them contemporaneous withMan of the hand and D’Homo rudolfensis, the first known representatives of the genus Homo discovered in East Africa. Another major problem: how to explain the last dating at the very remote age of 3.67 million years of Little Foot, the most complete Australopithecus skeleton ever found, in South Africa?
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The idea of a very young age for South African Australopithecines (A. africanus) takes the lead in the wing with a study published this…
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