Nacario's Digital Scrapbook

• A nine year old in South Africa had stumbled across fossils of a new hominid species that existed on Earth 2 million years ago.
• The fossils found had a mix of primitive and advanced anatomy of humans. It has become a new species and is called Australopithecus sediba. Sediba means fountain in Sotho, and it walked on 2 legs, with human-shaped hips and pelvis. However it climbed trees with monkey like arms, small teeth, and a some what modern face but without the modern brain.
  
• In a conference, the new species is said to be a possible ancestor of Homo erectus, the immediate predecessor to Homo sapiens.
• I relate this article to evolution. This discovery gives mankind a new species and it has characteristics that represent modern and primitive ancestors. This fossil can further educate the world of how he became more human and less ape like.

This is very recent news, and I am happy to see that there are even more species of our ancestors. Discoveries like these give us all a better understanding on how we could have been, how we evolved, and how we grew smart. Sediba had a few human like characteristics, but still had some ape like traits. Could that mean that evolution was working but still had some time to go to develop into what we are today? Most likely in my opinion. I can infer that the fossil still retained ape like arms because of natural selection. Where it lived in Africa could have been full of trees and hard to reach places that required strong arms. It was still in the process of evolution and it learned to walk upright but natural pressures made the Sediba retain it's ape like arms because it was still useful. Discoveries like this is what makes paleontology interesting.