Cave woman fossil in South Africa is finally a million years older than originally thought

A new dating of fossils in South Africa revealed that it is ea million years older than previously thought, fact that creates new data in paleoanthropology. Best known among these fossils is tthe skull of the so-called “Casples”the most complete African skull Australopithecus (Australopithecus africanus), which was found in South Africa in 1947. According to the new estimate, the skull dates from 3.4 to 3.6 million years ago, so this southern Australopithecus lived around the same time as the famous “Lucy”, an Australopithecus of East Africa.

The fossils, as reported by APE-MPE, had been 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, was published in Journal of the US National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), according to Agence France-Presse and the BBC, shifts their age by a million years to the past.

Given that the East African Australopithecus (Australopithecus afarensis), best known as Lucy 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 prehuman species traveled long distances, once met and came into a mixture, a fact that – if it happened – further complicates the evolutionary tree of man.

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