The Dawn of Humans: Redrawing Our Family Tree?
Photographs by Kenneth Garrett
Article by Lee R. Berger
He lived some 2.8 million years ago in southern Africa, where his skull was dug from a quarry near Johannesburg. Named Australopithecus africanus, he is hundreds of millenia closer to man than the East African hominid best known from the skeleton called Lucy. But new research indicates that africanus may have had a more apelike body than Lucy. And this reopens the question of who belongs where on the human family tree.
The author and colleague Henry McHenry studied more than a hundred fossil bones from Sterkfontein and Hadar, africanus fossils from the former and afarensis from the latter. They also studied the partial skeletons of STW 431, a male africanus, and Lucy herself. Their analysis yielded some startling results: africanus, Lucy’s supposed descendants, had heads that looked even more human, but they were top-heavy, as if the upper limbs belonged to a male and the lower to a female. For Lucy to evolve into these forms, evolution would have to go backward.
NGM 1998/08