Just before the earliest humans appeared, Africa was thick with all sorts of ape-but-not-ape creatures. It's the best candidate because Berger knows there were others at the time.
Peter Schmid via Lee Berger/University of Witwatersrand Anthropologists say the skeleton shows a "mix-and-match" anatomy, with traits of both primitive and modern animals. The hand skeleton of an adult Australopithecus sediba against a modern human hand. "In our opinion it's probably the best candidate ancestor for giving rise to our immediate ancestor," Berger says. Called Australopithecus sediba, anthropologist Lee Berger says this could be the one. Now, we have the South African fossils, dated at 1.9 million years ago. The true "transitional" species must have lived about the time we emerged. But a lot happened in between Lucy and the earliest humans, who emerged just over 2 million years ago. Lucy and her kind - the diminutive, ape-like Australopithecus that lived 3.2 million years ago - may well have evolved into us, the genus Homo. Nobody's found it, and any who claim to usually get publicly whacked by their peers.
The reason for the excitement? Ask anthropologists what they dream about, and many will tell you it's the fossil of the last pre-human ancestor that led directly to us. The bones belong to creatures related to the famous Lucy fossil found in Ethiopia in the 1970s, but their owners lived more recently - just 2 million years ago.
Tracy Kivell, paleoanthropologist, Max Planck Institute Sediba likely still used his hands for climbing in trees, but it was likely also capable of making the precision grips that we believe are necessary to make stone tools.
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