Remember Australopithecus sediba? The convention-challenging South African hominin, announced with much fanfare in 2010, has gotten lost in a torrent of other recent fossil finds from our family tree. A new study adds insult to injury, stacking the odds against A. sediba's place in our distant evolutionary past.
The last decade or so has been a wild ride for researchers trying to figure out the story of human evolution. The family tree of hominins — humans and species more closely related to us than to other apes — expanded considerably. Paleoanthropologists found entirely new species, such as the Denisovans, Homo naledi and Homo luzonensis, plus more examples of Homo floresiensis and a host of fragmentary fossils, stretching from Ethiopia to China, not yet assigned to a particular branch.
At the start of this flurry of finds, back in 2008, paleoanthropologist Lee Berger's young son famously noticed some bones at the ...
