Clarke wins dating game

02 April 2015 - 03:12 By Shaun Smillie

A new dating for one of South Africa's most famous fossils has demolished claims that East Africa is the birthplace of humanity. A multinational team of scientists will announce today that "Little Foot" is around 3.67million years old. The fossil was found in the Sterkfontein caves.This ends almost a decade of controversy about the age of the fossil.The scientists arrived at this figure using "cosmogenic nuclide" dating, which measures the radioactive decay rates of aluminium and beryllium in quartz.The researchers say that their results show that Little Foot, an Australopithecus prometheus hominid, was a contemporary of early Australopithecines in Tanzania and Ethiopia."There is a belief that East African fossils are the ancestors of everything else, but this is not the case. We have different Australopithecus in South Africa at the same time," said Professor Ron Clarke, who discovered Little Foot in 1994.Little Foot, only recently fully excavated, is one of the most complete Australopithecines found.Clarke and his team are now cleaning and reconstructing the skeleton.Part of the research, an account of which appears in the latest issue of Nature, dated stone tools found at Sterkfontein.The scientists arrived at a date of about 2.18million years."It shows that there was a certain level of intelligence even back then," said the paper's co-author Kathleen Kuman.The new dating of Little Foot reinforces the theory that hominids were widespread throughout Africa about 3.5million years ago.The date also confirms that there might have been interactions between the hominid species of southern and east Africa."What this shows is that different lines are moving through time, giving rise to new species," said Professor Chris Stringer, of the British Natural History Museum.The scientists want to date further dig sites in South Africa in the hope that their efforts will add light to a little understood period of humankind's evolution...

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