I found this wee bit of evolution news on Digg.
Ancient remains, once thought to be a key link in the evolution of mankind, have now been shown to be 400,000 years too young to be a part of man’s family tree.
The remains of the apeman, dubbed Little Foot, were discovered in a cave complex at Sterkfontein by a local South African team in 1997. Its bones preserved in sediment layers, it is the most complete hominid fossil skeleton ever found.
Little Foot is of the genus Australopithecus, thought by some to be part of the ancestral line which led directly to man. But research by Dr Jo Walker and Dr Bob Cliff of the University of Leeds School of Earth and Environment, with Dr Alf Latham of Liverpool University's School of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology, shows the remains are more than a million years younger than earlier estimates.
Source: Ancient ape ruled out of man's ancestral line
Poor Little Foot.
2 comments:
Interesting post Joe. This research in Africa interests me a lot and I try to keep up with the most recent findings.
I do know that palaeo-anthropologists tend to draw distinction between the S.African discoveries and those for example in Kenya. However the dating issue applies there also. Little Foot as you point out is a fossil related to the Australopithecus group. I'm unsure how the dating on Little Foot influences the current dating status of Aus fossils found in Kenya. There seems to be a consensus though that if we are talking direct ancestoral link the hominid specimen dubbed "Kenyathropus" is more likely candidate.
Even so I am skeptical, which why I prefer to refer to "links" as opposed to any type of direct ancestral chain. There is a view in the scientific community that a number of different sets of early hominid co-existed, and that makes a lot more sense to me, rather than a simple linear line of progression.
The dating method used for Little Foot is based on the calculation of rate of decay, related to isotopes. I'm not sure if they have used the same method on specimens in Kenya. That may also lead to a revision of present data.
I ran a search on the dating of the Kenyan fossils and there is debate there also, which has led me to revise a few earlier assumptions.
A primitive skull found in Chad - Sahelanthropus tchadensis - is believed to be 6 to 7 million years old.
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