Fossil cave woman in South Africa found a million years older than “Lucy”!

A new dating of fossils in South Africa revealed that it is a million years older than previously thought, a fact that creates new data in paleoanthropology. The most famous of these fossils is the skull of the so-called “Casples”, the most complete skull of the African Australopithecus (Australopithecus africanus), which was found in South Africa in 1947. According to the new estimate, the skull dates back to 3, 4 to 3.6 million years, so this southern Australopithecus lived around the same time as the famous Lucy, an East African Australopithecus.

The fossils were found in the Sterkfontaine Caves southwest of Johannesburg (also known as the “Cradle of Humanity”), where more Australopithecus fossils have come to light than anywhere else in the world. The previous dating put the age of “Cass Pleas” and the rest of the fossils 2.1 to 2.6 million years ago. But the new study, led by Daryl Granger of Pertio University, published in the journal National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), according to the French Agency and the BBC, shifts their age by a million years.

Given that the East African Australopithecus (Australopithecus afarensis), best known as the “Lucy” representative in Ethiopia, lived 3.2 million years ago, it is now considered possible that they were the ancestors of man who coexisted on the “black continent”. It is not ruled out by scientists that these two prehistoric species traveled long distances, once met and came into a mixture, a fact that – if it happened – further complicates the human evolutionary tree.

According to the Smithsonian Science Museum in the United States, Australopithecus walked on two legs, but were much shorter than today’s humans (averaging 1.38 meters for males and 1.15 meters for females).

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