Possible human relative, 2 million years old, a ‘snapshot of evolution in action’ (if there were such a thing as evolution)

Photo courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution - A replica of "Karabo," an adolescent of the species Australopithecus sediba who lived 2 million years ago, on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Researchers are debating whether the species was an ancestor of humans.

Possible human relative, 2 million years old, a ‘snapshot of evolution in action’

By Brian Vastag,
WashPost
Updated: Thursday, September 8, 8:00 AM

He was built to climb, and yet he strode upright.

His arms hung low like an orangutan’s. Yet with his long thumbs and curved fingers he could grasp sticks and rocks like a man.

His brain was not much larger than a chimpanzee’s. Yet his widened pelvis implied his kind gave birth to children with much bigger brains.

And so a fossilized adolescent named Karabo — which means “answer” in a South African dialect — is raising a lot of questions about human evolution.

Researchers found his skeleton, and much of an adult female, in a cave some 25 miles north of Johannesburg in 2008 and announced the discovery in 2010. They coined a new species, Australopithecus sediba, and launched an intensive multi-national effort to study the find.

(More here.)