Sediba may be human forebear

摘要

A surprising mix of apelike and humanlike features from head to toe supports a controversial contention that a 2-million-year-old member of the human evolutionary family gave rise to the genus Homo. An international team of researchers reports the details in six papers published April 12 in Science. Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and his colleagues assigned two partial skeletons and other fossils found in a South African cave in 2008 to a species they named Australopithecus sediba (reconstructed skeleton shown).