LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Australopithecine
built 660 days ago
[One] famous finder of Australopithecine material is Donald Johanson. What is not mentioned in [his] book about Lucy is the fact that [the] bottom portion [of the skeleton fossil] - the knee and the leg bone which is [what] defines her as the ancestor of humans was not found with the rest of the skeleton. That knee bone and leg bone was found some three miles away, and according to Johanson, some fifty meters lower in strata. Many would deny all of the implications of that. What is left out [of most of the Australopithecine material], especially regarding the Leakeys' effort, is [that] they don't think at all, and never did [think] that this led to man or has anything to do with man. Notice the point that is acknowledged by Lewin, the Editor of Research News in SCIENCE magazine. He says, 'Richard and his parents, Louis and Mary, have held to a view of human origins for nearly half a century now that the line of true man, the line of Homo - large brain, toolmaking and so on - has a separate ancestry that goes back millions and millions of years.
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Researchers know that upright posture evolved first because the skeleton of famed Australopithecine, Lucy, has a small braincase but modern ankles. Yet with few known fossils older than about four million years, the details of how and when upright posture evolved have been hazy. Over the past few years... two important new finds have begun to fill in the gaps.
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Selam's remains are far more complete than two other Australopithecine children found in fossil beds at Laetoli in Ethiopia and Taung in South Africa. In addition to revealing how afarensis children developed physically, she is giving scientists some new anatomy to obsess over, namely her face, shoulder blades, even the hyoid--a fragile bone from her throat.
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Archaeologists ... found stone tools near Swartkrans, crude “cores,” flake and scraping tools, as well as bone tools, that are well correlated with Australopithecine use. Tools and smashed bones of hominids and other animals were found together in the same cave. This kind of evidence led Raymond Dart to assume that Australopithecines were hunters (and murderers) through which he formulated his “Man the Hunter” hypothesis. Further analysis suggested that A. robustus was more prey than predator, that scavengers and weather may have changed and moved the organisms around a bit in the 1.5 to two million year interim between death and discovery. Casual analysis of cause and effect are not always correct. The tools from Swartkrans did provide insight into what A. robustus’ lifestyle may have been.
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The facultative bipedalism exhibited by the Australopithecine appears to be a primary evolutionary criteria for transitional status and ... linking them to humans. Although their favored locomotion repertoire is unlike the primarily quadruped gorilla and chimpanzee, other species of apes are considered facultative bipedal. The locomotion characteristics of both the Gibbon and Siamang are very similar to the Australopithecine being well suited for climbing and exhibit brachiation as their primary mode of locomotion 14. They are also known to be habitual bipedal (however ungainly) when they choose to locomote terrestrially.
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![[image]](http://retrieverimages.lycos.com/images/a/u/s/australopithecine/i/000.gif)
Zeresenay Alemseged compares a newly discovered piece of the 3.3-million-year-old Australopithecine child named Selam to an older specimen at the National Museum of Ethiopia in Addis Ababa. (Courtesy Max Planck Institute) [LARGERIMAGE]
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