Cave women unearth skull of unknown human ancestor

[bluedigger]

An all-woman team of spelunking scientists has retrieved hundreds of fossils from a 100-foot-deep (30-meter-deep) cave in South Africa — including the cranium from what appears to be a prehistoric humanlike creature.

Friday's retrieval of the skull was a climactic moment for the three-week expedition to the Rising Star Cave in South Africa's Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site, just 25 miles (40 kilometers) north of Johannesburg.

The Rising Star Expedition, backed by the National Geographic Society, was put together after a pair of recreational cavers came upon the trove of bones last month. They alerted Lee Berger, a paleoanthropologist at the University of the Witwatersrand who has been behind a long string of significant finds in South Africa and serves as a National Geographic explorer-in-residence.

Berger was excited to hear that the fossilized bones could represent a new group of hominins. ("Hominins" has become the preferred term for humans and our close extinct relatives, such as Neanderthals. Scientists now use the term "hominids" to refer to those species as well as to gorillas and chimpanzees.)
http://www.nbcnews.com/science/cave-women-unearth-skull-unknown-human-ancestor-2D11603661

[Heather MC]

1. Bummer the didn't show the skull

Or was it that small piece of a jaw? I was hoping for a whole head

[Judi Lynn]

2. So much ahead, too, for the "underground astronauts."

Great page of videos from a blog link in your original article:



http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/blog/rising-star-expedition/

Amazing step forward. And downward. And upward.

[leftyohiolib]

3. cave women?