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Technique Dates Skeleton Back 4M Years

Thursday, April 24, 2003
(4:42 PM)
The Associated Press

Australopithecus is an extinct hominid species that lived from about 4 to 2.5 million years ago. Lucy, a famed pre-human fossil find found in Ethiopia, was identified as a type of Australopithecus. The new age dating technique suggests that the fossils from Sterkfontein Cave are even older than Lucy.

The skull and left humerus of Astralopithecus anamensis, an extinct species of the on the human family tree, seen in in this undated image in a cave in South Africa, were first discovered in 1997, and thought to be about 3 million years old. But a new dating techniques suggests that the nearly complete early human skeleton was buried about 4 million years ago, some 1 million years earlier that previously thought, and making it one of the oldest known hominid discoveries.
Image Credit: AP / Science

WASHINGTON -- APA new dating technique suggests that a human-like fossil skeleton found in South Africa was buried about 4 million years ago, which makes it one of the oldest known hominid discoveries.

That's 1 million years earlier than previously thought.

The nearly complete skeleton came from the Sterkfontein caves that contain rich deposits of remains from the pre-human branches of the ancestral tree that led to modern humans. The bones are identified as a type of Australopithecus, an extinct form of pre-humans.

Skeleton fossils unearthed in 1997 were age dated at about 3 million years using a technique that measured the changes in the Earth's magnetic field geochemically recorded within rocks found with the fossils. The results had been disputed by experts who said the method was not precise.

In the new effort, researchers, led by Darryl E. Granger and M.W. Caffee of Purdue University, measured the decay of isotopes in cave sediments to establish the older ages. A report on their study appears Friday in the journal Science.
(More: Netscape Network News)
2003 © The Associated Press.

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