|This image from the journal Science shows a hand skeleton of an
adult female A. sediba against a modern human hand. (Peter
Schmid/Courtesy of Lee Berger And University of Witwatersrand)|
Skeleton could be human relative Researchers hail fossilized
youth WASHINGTON - He was built to climb, and yet he strode
upright. His arms hung low like an orangutan’s. Yet with his
long thumbs and curved fingers he could grasp sticks and rocks
like a man. His brain was not much larger than a chimpanzee’s.
Yet his widened pelvis implied his kind gave birth to children
with much bigger brains. And so a fossilized adolescent named
Karabo - which means “answer’’ in a South African dialect - is
raising a lot of questions about human evolution. Researchers
found his skeleton, and much of an adult female, in a cave about
25 miles north of Johannesburg in 2008 and announced the
discovery in 2010. They coined a new species, Australopithecus
sediba, and launched an intensive multinational effort to study
the find. In the journal Scie