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She had a powerful lower back for hoisting herself in trees and hanging below branches. However, Issa also has features that suggest she was a tree climber. She demonstrates other clear adaptations to bipedalism, like widening of the inter-articular facets of the lumbar vertebrae, which form a “pyramidial configuration” and allows weight transmission of the upper body down through the lower back. So we were able to reject our previous hypothesis that Issa was characterised by “hyperlordosis” (at the extreme end of modern human variation, or excessive lordosis)Īustralopithecus sediba silhouette showing the newly-found vertebrae (coloured) along with other skeletal remains from the species. The new fossils allow us to include more lumbar vertebrae, which really balanced out our estimation of curvature to something quite similar to the degree of lordosis we modern humans have in fact, Issa’s bony wedging was most similar to the modern human female average. From these, we found the bony wedging to indicate that Issa potentially had a highly lordotic – curved forward – lower back. In 2013, we only had the two lowest lumbar vertebrae. We were able to say a lot more about Issa’s lower back and adaptations to bipedalism (walking on two legs) than we could before. What did the new lumbar vertebrae reveal? This allowed us to study Issa’s nearly complete lower back. Much of the lumbar column was missing.īut all the while, new fossils were being discovered – and in 2016, the new lumbar vertebrae were prepared.
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Initially, what we knew about Issa’s spine came from lower thoracic vertebrae, lower lumbar vertebrae, and a partial pelvis. We have already described the vertebrae that had been recovered up to about 2013 and, in 2018, published full, detailed descriptions and comparative analyses of the skeletons. He kindly invited me to work on them and I have been doing so ever since. sediba was published during that time and I wrote to Professor Lee Berger who discovered the first fossil remains with his then nine year old son asking about the vertebrae I could see in the figures in their publication. I wrote my dissertation on the evolution of the vertebral column in hominoids, a group that contains us and our closest relatives, the apes (chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and gibbons). What prompted you to examine this particular set of fossils? It has been a very controversial species for that reason. So, we knew that there were at least two individuals at Malapa, that they dated to just under 2 million years old, and they were a distinct species – one that retained many primitive features of Australopithecus yet also had features of the skull, teeth, and skeleton that were more like members of our genus, Homo. Parts of two partial skeletons (juvenile male “Karabo” and adult female “Issa”) have been recovered in the remnants of the Malapa cave and outside it. They had blasted the site and used some of the large blocks to build the mining road – and they were blasting hominin fossils too. The new lumbar vertebra fossils came from one such block, removed from a makeshift road made by miners many years ago. If so, the blocks are prepared down to reveal the fossils. That’s partly because on-site excavations have taken place since 2008, but also because large blocks that were removed from the site have been scanned with medical computed tomography (CT) to see if there are fossils inside. This species was first discovered in 2008 (and announced in 2010) the recovery of new fossil material from Malapa has continued since then. What was known about Australopithecus sediba before this research? Williams about the research and its implications. The Conversation Africa’s Natasha Joseph asked lead author Scott A. Scientists from New York University in the US, South Africa’s University of the Witwatersrand and 15 other institutions have published a journal article that shows Australopithecus sediba walked like a human but climbed like an ape.
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The discovery of a lumbar vertebra from the lower back of a single female Australopithecus sediba – with other parts of the same specimen’s vertebrae – has changed this. Until recently, it was not clear how much the species spent climbing in trees and walking on two legs on the ground. Around two million years ago an ancient human relative, Australopithecus sediba, lived in what is today South Africa, nearby a cave called Malapa that’s a part of the Cradle of Humankind.