New human ancestor?

I just heard about 20 seconds about this on the radio. This is super cool--these sorts of things always are. Thanks for the link to the article.

sure thing!

I am sure there were quite a few hominids aound but which one evolved into humans and if they even interbred is interesting.

OK, that's a link to pix.

Here's the New York Times article on this find.

It's amazing how much change was occurring in our line in such a short period of time.

There must have been a lot of variation in our genes, ready to go, and our ancestors must have been spreading into new environments very effectively. Then if there were lots of environmental changes during that time, it would account for many bottleneck isolated communities (resulting in lots of pockets of speciation).

The Times article says that they determined it is a new species because it has traits of both pithecines and hominids--specifically that it had the long legs of a bi-pedal species. Very interesting stuff.

Thanks for the link, Set.

From Bergers article in SCience. The two skeletons have several features that are Afarensis -like but others , like the more squared off teeth like us give this fossil a new place at the table for hominid development. The thing I found interesting is that it took aeveral years to see how the fossils were deposited


Heres the complement of bones from both specimens and it appeared that they died at about the same time

Cool!

I just logged on to post this story. Exciting times.

Wow

Now there are 8 (or maybe 9) species of Australopithecus

You mean "newly found old human ancestor ? " What dictates these findings is where the right aged rock structures are already on the surface. This has led to all sorts of rubbish about possible migrations and so forth. Just because you find a fossil in one place doesnt mean they are only found there or that there were any more than a few of them. It takes about 3-5,000 years to make a new bird species, and with a long track record like we have, there are many more to find somewhere.

One of the criteria used is the number of differing key points of anatomy to determine if it is a different species or not. Great deal about nothing is made if they find a fossil and it doesnt have enough bone to distinguish it. Heated arguments develop about where to place it and these are never resolved, even if it does have enough bone, simply some opinions win out and become mainstream whilst others are relegated to the back row of the auditorium if they get invited at all.

I think it is fairly well established that our ancestral tree had many branches and it will be hard to lay these in any kind of line to determine our lineage for quite some time to come.

But dont you just love it when they release these things to the press ? The articles are so more interesting then dry journal papers. I cant wait for the documentary.... Good post littlek !