The popularity of genealogical database demonstrates that human beings have a great desire to learn where we come from . go back a few million years , this translates to a debate about whichAustralopithecusspecies was the direct ancestor ofHomo , the genus to which we belong . New research shows it is improbable southern Africa’sA. sedibacould have evolved into early homo .
A. sedibawas discovered in 2008 at Malapa near Johannesburg . The vertical nature of its walk led its discoverer to argue it made a well candidate for the ancestor of humanity than otherAustralopithecusspecies .
All knownA. sedibafossils are around 2 million class old . The oldestHomofossil is 2.8 million years honest-to-goodness , from chiliad of kilometer off in Ethiopia . To non - anthropologist , these facts might seem to be enough to concludeA.sedibawas an evolutionary dead end , plugging away while the literal action was elsewhere .
However , Dr Andrew Duof the University of Chicago explained the claim ofA. sediba ’s discoverers to have found our large - great … grandparent can not be dismissed that easy . " It is definitely possible for an ascendant ’s fossil to postdate a descendent ’s by a large amount of time , ” Du say in astatement . Human fossils degrade so well , and so much of Africa remains uncontrived for these design , that it is certainly possibleA. sedibawas around far before , and theHomogenus broke aside from it early on .
However , potential and likely are very different thing . For his doctorate , Du explore the chance of this having occurred . InScience Advances , he calculates the chance ofA. sedibabeing so much older without us knowing about it at 0.09 percent . Du looked at 28 cases of species broadly relate to humanity and what are believe to be their ancestors . In only one case the first grounds we find oneself of the descendent was old than the equivalent exercise we have of the ascendent .
Moreover , the anomaly , Homo antecessor , preceded its likely ascendent by a comparatively credible 100,000 years in the fossil book , requiringHomo erectusto have come along reasonably sooner than fossils indicated . By comparison , Dusaid , “ 800,000 years is quite a long metre . ”
So if we do n’t add up fromA. sediba , then who are our ancestors ? Du thinks the most potential candidate isA. afarensisis , widely known as “ Lucy ” after the name give to the first specimen to be get wind . We have examples going back 3.9 million yr , placing them before any knownHomorepresentative . She may have beenmore tree - dwellingthanA. sediba , but Lucy and all her kin lived in Ethiopia , overlap with where the earliest mankind were establish .
Other anthropologist proceed to make the shell for other sprig on the sept bush , such asA. africanus , so the debate is unlikely to finish shortly .
