We can now reconstruct the spine of a single individual, and strengthen the case that the species was bipedal at some point.
Life 23 November 2021.
By Michael Marshall
The silhouette shows the newly-found vertebrae along with other bones. The life reconstruction of Australopithecus sediba is right.
The NYU and Wits University are pictured right.
One of the most complete back fossils of any hominin has been reconstructed using the bones of an extinct human relative found in a South African cave.
The spine was curved, suggesting that Australopithecus sediba spent a lot of time walking on two legs.
A. sediba was described in 2010 by Lee Berger and his team at the University of the Witwatersrand. They described a male child and an adult female as partially preserved. The Malapa cave system contains both of them.
Some of the first A. sediba bones were found in chunks of rock that had been blasted from the cave.
Who are you? The story of human origins is being changed.
Some of the blocks were used to build the road. Berger's colleagues have been chipping away at these blocks for the past decade. A bone called the sacrum that links the spine to the pelvis has been found by one. The female is called the "protector" in Swahili.
The new bones show that most of the lower back has been excavated. The team concluded that her spine was curved so that it forms a gentle S-shape, a characteristic of humans that keeps the body's mass centred over the pelvis for efficient bipedal walking.
The upper body of A. sediba has been found to be similar to that of apes and humans for tree climbing.
Scott Williams at New York University says that the new analysis supports this. He says it is reinforcing what has been said before.
There is a journal reference called eLife.
There are more on these topics.
