Sentences with word «australopithecine»
Anthropologists have long assumed that the short stature of australopithecines like Lucy was related to treetop living: Having short legs makes it easier to climb trees and gives stability when balancing on branches.
discovermagazine.com
In 1938, he found the first robust australopithecine skull at Kromdraai after a schoolboy discovered some teeth at the site.
They also present evidence for similar differences between the sexes in Australopithecines (early relatives of humans), suggesting that women long ago evolved such scaffolding to compensate for walking upright while supporting their swelling wombs.
«This is the most human - like australopithecine yet discovered,» says Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London, who was not involved in the study.
Except for having small rather than large teeth, and a quadrupedal rather than a bipedal pelvis, pygmy chimpanzees are remarkably like early gracile australopithecines in their skeletal dimensions.
And it's a funny species because it has a lot of traits in common with Australopithecines, like Lucy, who lived a little more than three million years ago, and early members of our own genus, Homo.
Then the scientists noticed the ridge in a pitted, yellowed skull of our 2 - million - year - old relative Homo erectus — but not in older hominids known as australopithecines, who walked the earth as far back as 4.4 million years ago.
Clarke points out (1998) that not only has this fossil yielded the most complete australopithecine skull yet found, it has been found in association with the most complete set of foot and leg bones known so far, with more probably still to be extracted from the rock (and since then, the arm and hand has been discovered.)
Researchers agree that our early australopithecine ancestors in Africa probably had light skin beneath hairy pelts.
A. sediba «s «face, teeth, pelvis and legs show more human characteristics, and those indicate that this is the most human - like australopithecine yet discovered», says Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London, who was not involved in the study.
However, its fingers were longer and more curved than most australopithecines — indeed, more curved than those of nearly any other species of early hominin.
Shifting climate favored the spread of open grasslands, and the early australopithecines gave rise to new lineages.
Partridge et al. (2003) claimed an age of 4 million years, which if correct would make Stw 573 one of the oldest known australopithecine fossils, and easily the oldest from South Africa.
But despite some modern traits, it has a number of australopithecine features, and a brain size of only about 750 cc (compared to the modern human average of at least 1350 cc).
The juvenile is the most complete australopithecine skeleton yet found from the period: it includes much of the skull and large parts of an arm, leg and pelvis.
June 30, 2000 Added a page on Little Foot, a new australopithecine skeleton from South Africa.
The background to this is that there are two schools of thought about australopithecine locomotion.
Stone tools have been found at sites with Australopithecus fossils, as well as bones with possible cut marks dating back to 3.2 million to 3.4 million years ago, but in the absence of a fossil hand gripping a tool, it has been impossible to prove that australopithecines made and used tools.
Intriguingly, H. naledi's pelvis was more like that of australopithecines such as Lucy, flaring outward more than that of modern humans.
We decided to consider not only australopithecines, but also some early Homo individuals, in order to emphasise that the estimated stature of S1 can be comparable to that of more derived taxa, such as Homo erectus sensu lato.
Java Man is correctly classified as Homo erectus in museums, and Nutcracker Man as a robust australopithecine not ancestral to humans.
This list of authors on australopithecine locomotion is very far from exhaustive.
What AiG missed in that paper is — well, they obviously missed the entire message of it, but the implication which Spoor et al. draw for australopithecine locomotion is encapsulated in a statement on p. 648,
To start, the trio butchered a sheep carcass with sharp stone flakes and found that the cutmarks indeed resembled those found on two different Australopithecine fossil arm bones — one dating to 4.2 million years ago and the other to 3.4 million years ago — as well as 2.5 - million - year - old animal bones discovered near the known stone tools in the Olduvai Gorge.
Gibbons focuses on the people who hunt and find fossils like the 3.5 - million - year - old australopithecine Lucy, discovered in Ethiopia in 1974, and the hominid skull Toumaï, which was found in Chad in 2001 and dates from 6 million to 7 million years old — close to the time when our lineage split from that of chimpanzees.
«Ground nesting can become established despite the presence of predators and without the use of fire,» says Koops, adding that this suggests australopithecines may have slept on the ground too.
«What we really need are more specimens and some trail of fossils that shows us how LB1 got to Flores» while retaining characteristics of australopithecines for more than a million years, Schoenemann observes.
About 4 million years ago, Ardi may have given rise to the chimp - size australopithecines, including A. anamensis.
Was our famous australopithecine ancestor Lucy really a man?
During this time, Australopithecine brains started to show subtle changes in structure and shape as compared with apes.
Thus, in an attempt to provide a synthetic picture of stature among australopithecines and early Homo, and to ensure that the results are comparable, we relied on a limited number of different datasets.
In fact, despite its larger brain size, Cronin et al. (1981) consider 1470 to be more primitive, with more australopithecine features, than 1813.
They seemed more similar to the ancient African australopithecines than to any member of the Homo genus.
The use of the modern human reference samples for stature estimates are inappropriate because they assume body proportions akin to modern humans, which are not possessed by australopithecines.
The skull of the young male australopithecine, unearthed in South Africa, is so well preserved that early analysis of X-ray tomographic images taken at the European Synchrotron Research Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France, reveals that the brain may have left its imprint on sediment filling the skull.
Paleoanthropologists know a lot more about cutmarks now than they did 20 years ago precisely because bold claims about Australopithecine butchers thrust the research into the spotlight, he says.
That skeleton makes sense if australopithecines slept in trees at night to escape predators, as chimps do today.
A. sediba had long, apelike arms; a braincase one - third the size of a modern human's; and a modern - looking pelvis that suggests it was a better upright walker than previous australopithecines.
A. sediba has a strange mix of human and australopithecine qualities.
The molars are big — larger than those of any recent humans and within the range of pre-human Australopithecines who lived millions of years ago.
In days of old, when our ancestors roamed Earth — that is to say, in November 1993 — a pair of naked, hairy australopithecines strolled arm in arm across the cover of DISCOVER.
Australopithecines proliferated in the rift valleys of eastern Africa about 2.6 million to 4 million years ago.
The human lineage, the genus Homo, and its close relatives, including australopithecines such as the famed Lucy, are together referred to as hominins.
The apelike australopithecines (Lucy and her ilk) never ventured out of Africa.