- The story of the origin of man looks
likely to be rewritten yet again after the discovery in South Africa of
a near complete skeleton of an ape-man thought to be three million years
old.
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- If confirmed, this would make the remains
500,000 years older than anything previously unearthed south of Tanzania.
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- The 1.22-metre-tall (four feet) hominid
(ape-man) was discovered at Sterkfontein, north of Johannesburg. Professor
Phillip Tobias, who led the team of researchers from South Africa's University
of the Witwatersrand, said on Wednesday that find would aid the search
for the missing link in man's evolution from ape to human.
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- "[This is] probably the most momentous
palaeo-anthropological find ever made in Africa," Tobias said.
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- Dr Ron Clarke, who led the excavations,
said the bones belonged to the Australopithecus, which had both human and
ape-like features. He said the find followed the discovery of four fossilised
foot bones in 1994, the tibia in July last year and the skull last September.
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- Clarke said it was unclear if the creature
was male or female, but it was already able to walk.
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- "The anatomy of the ankle joint
shows [it] was already bipedal but able to climb in trees by virtue of
a divergent big toe," he said, adding, "We imagine that it lived
a very similar life to that lead by chimpanzees today."
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- Shaft fall
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- Scientists determined the creature's
date of origin by examining the rock. It appears it may have fallen down
a 15-metre (45-foot) shaft. The shaft then later filled with limestone,
locking-in the treasure.
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- The entire remains have yet to be removed
from the rock - a process expected to take another year. When the task
is finally completely, palaeo-anthropologists will examine it and argue
over its significance.
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- Some argue that our early ancestors had
cousins - off-shoots of the family who then died out. Others say we were
descended in a direct line from the kind of skeletons unearthed at Sterkfontein.
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- Tobias said the find was "one of
the many missing links" between humans and apes. "We are getting
down nearer and nearer to the critical parting of ways between the hominids
- our family - and the African apes, which share with us common ancestry,
perhaps about five to seven million years ago."
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- The team believes the find is the most
significant since the discovery in 1924 of a skull belonging to the so-called
Taung child, the first fossil found belonging to Australopithecus. That
also was unearthed at Sterkfontein.
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- Previously, the most complete early hominid
was "Lucy," an Australopithecus whose partial skeleton was discovered
in 1974 in Ethiopia. The oldest complete skeleton before this latest discovery
dates back to 1.8 million years, Clarke said. It was that of a Homo Erectus,
found in Kenya.
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- The discovery, documented Wednesday in
the South African Journal of Science, was to be reported in the magazine
Nature in London on Thursday, researchers said at a news conference.
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