Walking Small: Humanlike legs took Homo out of Africa
By Bruce Bower
The earliest known human ancestors that trekked from Africa into Asia possessed legs, feet, and spines much like ours, even as they sported relatively apelike arms and small brains, according to an analysis of 1.77-million-year-old fossils unearthed in the central Asian nation of Georgia.
A team led by David Lordkipanidze of the Georgian National Museum in Tbilisi recovered 33 lower-body bones from at least three adults and one teenager at a site called Dmanisi. The researchers had previously found four skulls and four lower jaws, as well as simple stone tools, in the same sediment (SN: 5/13/00, p. 308). In several cases, skull and lower-body remains come from the same individual.