3.6 Million-Year-Old Ape-Man Found In South Africa

3.6 Million-Year-Old Ape-Man Found In South Africa

Find may support human-ape link

JOHANNESBURG (December 10, 1998 11:39 a.m. EST http://www.nandotimes.com) - South African researchers said on Wednesday they had discovered the world's first near-complete skull and skeleton of an ape-man estimated to be 3.6 million years old.

The four-foot-tall fossil was unearthed at Sterkfontein on the outskirts of Johannesburg and is estimated to be 3.6 million years old.

The oldest previous skeleton was 3.2 million year-old "Lucy," found in Ethiopia, while older specimens recovered from East Africa yielded only fragments of the whole frame.

"The new find at Sterkfontein is, therefore, the oldest hominid skeleton yet discovered anywhere in the world," said Tim Partridge. He, together with the Geomagnetism Laboratory of the University of Liverpool, assessed the age of the fossil.

Professor Phillip Tobias, who led the team of researchers from South Africa's University of the Witwatersrand, told a news conference that the discovery would answer many questions about human evolution that continue to mystify scientists.

Tobias said the age of the fossil would also help to provide clues to the debate on when some apes had evolved into humans.

"We're getting down nearer to the critical parting of the ways between apes and us -- perhaps five to seven million years," Tobias said.

Ron Clarke, director of excavations at Sterkfontein, said preliminary evidence showed that the ape-man not only walked upright, but was also a tree climber.

"We are at a time where humankind was experimenting with two-legged motion and we really do need full information on how they moved and ultimately that tells us what their lifestyle was," said Professor Hilary Deacon at Stellenbosch University.

"We need to know what these first stages in becoming human were about and I think it's a very exciting find in those terms," he told Reuters in a telephone interview.

Clarke said the full significance of the find would emerge once it was recovered from a 45-foot-deep limestone shaft.

"What we already know is it will reveal a very great deal about the anatomy and evolution of an early ape-man," he said.

"Just one bone would be exciting but this is apparently the whole skeleton -- the secret to knowing how the creature functioned. This eliminates any speculation," said Tobias.

"It is the most important find out of South Africa since the Taung skull was found in 1924 this probably exceeds that in importance," he said.

Past finds of ape-man fossils, including the oldest hominid bones in East Africa, have only been partial skeletons.

Professor Deacon said the South African discovery linked southern Africa with East Africa -- which has long been believed to be the cradle of modern man -- and underscored the importance of sub-Saharan Africa to the study of the origins of humankind.

"I think it's a very notable achievement. One needs to know how these creatures moved and having more of the skeleton is extremely important," Deacon said.

The discovery followed three years of work after Clarke chanced on four hominid footbones while looking in a box labelled "animal bones" which were collected from a cave at Sterkfontein on the outskirts of Johannesburg.

The footbones led him to believe that the rest of the skeleton must be fossilized in the cave.

Clarke's assistants, Nkwane Molefe and Stephen Motsumi, spent a year in the dark, wet cavern chipping away at the limestone looking for the skeleton.

Clarke said there were signs of further hominid fossils at Sterkfontein, site of more than 600 other fossil discoveries which South Africa has nominated as a World Heritage site.

"Up to now Australopithecus of that antiquity have only been found in east and central Africa so it's really thrilling that they came down this far," said Dave Roberts, a geologist with the Council for Geoscience.

"It does increase the possibility that the first modern humans arose in southern Africa and they may have migrated north" he said.

Roberts said the age of the new ape man tied in with the footprints discovered in northern Tanzania which provided the first conclusive evidence of ape-like creatures walking upright.

By EMELIA SITHOLE, Reuters