An international team of scientists has discovered a two-million-year-old fossil vertebrae from an extinct species of ancient human relative. New lower back fossils are the "missing link" that settles ...

In 2008, 9-year-old Matthew Berger was just out walking his dog when he tripped over what he thought was a rock. What he actually discovered was far more significant—a nearly 2-million-year-old fossil ...

"I imagine there might be some though who will be skeptical -- as is always the case." Their argument centers on a timeline: The oldest known Homo fossil, a jawbone, is dated at 2.8 million years old, ...

When studying how fossil hominids moved, researchers usually analyze the morphology of bones—which is crucial for understanding the evolution of bipedalism—focusing mainly on muscle insertion sites.

The fossil site of Malapa in the Cradle of Humankind, South Africa, discovered by Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in August 2008, has been one of the most productive ...

A diagram of how the skeletons of Australopithecus sediba came to be preserved in the Malapa cave deposit. From Dirks et al, 2010. A little less than two million years ago, in what is now South Africa ...

In 2008, a nine-year-old boy named Matthew Berger chased after his dog Tau near a site called the Cradle of Humankind in South Africa. As he ran past the Malapa pit, he tripped. Pausing to examine ...

Spinal bones of an extinct human relative have been found in lumps of rock blasted out of a South African cave and used to reconstruct one of the most complete back fossils of any hominin. The spine ...

The recovery of new lumbar vertebrae from the lower back of a single individual of the human relative, Australopithecus sediba, and portions of other vertebrae of the same female from Malapa, South ...

The fossil record for the ancient hominin A. sediba is younger than that of Homo, a “highly unlikely” scenario for a direct lineage. Researchers delivered engineered photosynthetic membranes from ...