Around two million years ago, the Voranthropus Robustus side lived on the side with early predecessor of modern humans. Most of the insights about these prehistoric relatives have so far come from skull and tooth fossils. For the first time, researchers have found leg bones that provide information about the size, stature and locomotion of the paranthropus Robustus. Accordingly, the early hominid species already went on two legs, but was only about one meter tall and thus a slight prey for predators.
The Paranthropus Robustus lived together with other early and pre-human species in South Africa around two million years ago. Among other things, numerous fossils testify to this in the Swartkrans cave, which is about 30 kilometers from Johannesburg. So far, however, fossil skulls and teeth have been discovered by the early relative of man. Although they have already made many conclusions about the nutrition and social organization of Paranthropus Robustus, many questions remained unanswered in the absence of fossils of his other body.
Winzling on two legs
Now a team led by Travis Pickering from the University of Wisconsin Madison in the USA has described an revealing new fossil from the Swartkrans cave. It is a movable hip bone with an adjacent thigh bone and shin. As Pickering and his team could show, all bones came from a single individual of the paranthropus robustus. For the first time, the Fossil provides insights into the size, stature and locomotion of our pre -human sister species.
The fossil leg bones suggest that Paranthropus Robustus already went upright similar to today’s people, but was very small. “We estimate that this individual, probably a female, was only about one meter tall in his death and weighed 27 kilograms,” reports Pickering. “It was even smaller than the adult representatives of other small species and early species, including the famous skeletons of ‘Lucy’ (Australopithecus Afarensis, about 3.2 million years old) and the ‘Hobbit’, (Homo Floresiensis, about 90,000 years old) from Ethiopia or Indonesia.”
Sacrifice of a predator
Earlier examinations on skulls had already indicated that male individuals of Paranthropus Robustus were probably larger than female. Because although all of the species found have a strong, robust pine and thus delimit the species from the related Australopithecus, the paranthropus skulls differ significantly in size. So if the newly discovered leg bones actually come from a woman, it is likely that their male conspecifics were larger than a meter.
Nevertheless, the low body size probably made the representatives of Paranthropus Robustus a slight prey for predators such as saber-toothed cats and giant hyenas, which at that time were known to live in the vicinity of the Swartkrans cave. This also indicates traces of the bones found: “The examination of surface damage on the fossils revealed toothprints and other bite traces that are identical to those who leave leopards on the bones of their prey,” reports co-author Jason Heaton from the University of Alabama in Birmingham. The finding also fits earlier theories, according to which the large accumulation of early and pre-human bones in the Swartkrans cave could at least partially go back to the fact that carnivores and leopards dragged their prey there and consumed there.
In future studies, pickering and his team plan to examine the internal structures of the bones in more detail with the help of computer tomography. From this, you hope for additional information about the growth and development patterns of Paranthropus Robustus and its locomotion.
Source: Travis Pickering (University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA) et al, Journal of Human Evolution, DOI: 10.1016/J.Jhevol.2024.103647