The Ancients - Human Origins: Australopithecus

Episode Date: June 11, 2023

For millions of years, Australopithecus thrived in Africa's vast landscapes, laying the groundwork for the emergence of the Homo genus. Later, alongside early members of the Homo genus, Australopithecus played a crucial role in shaping human evolution and our present-day existence.In this episode, Tristan welcomes Professor Fred Spoor from the Natural History Museum back to the podcast. Together they delve into what we know so far about Australopiths. From their own evolution to the discovery of the famous partial skeleton 'Lucy' and the extraordinary archaeological findings that have emerged since. Looking at the latest revelations including the remarkable Dikika child - what can these ancient remnants teach us about our earliest ancestors? And how did they contribute to the path of human evolution?You can take part in our listener survey here.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code ANCIENTS. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. And in today's episode, where we're going to Africa more than three million years ago

to talk about this species now called Australopithecus, the southern apes, that was certainly on the human line. It lived in Africa for a couple of million years, for a few million years, both before the emergence of our genus, the genus Homo, and also lived alongside these early species of the genus Homo, for instance Homo habilis. Now, when someone mentions Australopithecus, your mind might immediately go to one of the most well-known archaeological discoveries ever made, the discovery of the partial skeleton, Lucy, because Lucy was an Australopithecus, in particular an Australopithecus

afarensis. Now in today's episode we will certainly be covering the story of Lucy, however since Lucy's discovery there have been some more extraordinary fossils uncovered in Africa of Australopithecus and we're also going to be focusing on these two, particularly the story of a child, a baby girl, just under three years old, called the Dikika child. It's an incredibly poignant but extraordinary discovery in recent times. Now, to explain all about this and more, I was delighted to get back on the podcast a good friend from the Natural History Museum he's been on recently to talk about early homo so homo habilis in the first humans but also talking about a species that he's done a lot of work around Kenyanthropus platyops and their

association with the first tools with them being potentially the first toolmakers living some 3.3 million years ago, I am of course talking about Professor Fred Spohr. He's here today to talk all things Australopithecus. I really do hope you enjoy, and here's Fred. Fred, it is wonderful to have you back on the podcast. Great to see you again and to talk about my favorite topic. Well, yes, exactly. We're going back to early, I guess, is it humans or should we say hominin? Well, it's whatever you call human, and you can say early human ancestors,

and that is even that not all of them are ancestors, but the early hominins, early humans, it's fine. And in particular, Australopithecines. Do they seem to be one of the most successful groups of early hominins that we know of that existed? Yes, they were certainly around for quite a while. Broadly speaking, big sweeping statements, sort of between four and two million years ago. What may be worthwhile briefly pointing out seems to technicality.

We have to unfortunately get on with that sort of things. They used to be called the Australopithecines, but for various technical reasons, you will now see that most of us, both in the scientific press and in the sort of general literature, people talk about Australopiths. It has to do with how all these groups are classified. And that in itself has to do again by our understanding of how we as humans are related to our closest relatives, the great apes. It used to be that we had humans and then you had somewhere a little bit further away, you had all these great apes. now we know that's incorrect it's us and our closest relatives is a chimpanzee and we form a little club together and the gorillas come

somewhere later and the orangutans even further away and if you regroup all of that then all the names have to change a little bit so you will hear me say australopith very often instead of australopithecine that's fine and I'll say australopith as well from now on. It's a huge amount of time that you give a rough estimate between like two and four million years ago and we've got a couple of examples of casts of some of these skulls in front of us. Now I know that there are various species of australopiths but what are some like overall defining characteristics of these species? Very superficially looking. You could say they're very ape-like in their head, in their skull. That's not entirely right.

We can come to that later on. In particular, in a very characteristic way, what they lack that apes have, particularly the living great apes that you see around, chimps, gorillas, orangutans, they lack those big canine teeth that you see particular in the males so that's reduced and that's a very human-like feature that males and females have the same size canine more or less they clearly been shrunk in evolutionary time in some way and

the usurpiths already had that that's one aspect the rest brain size is only a little bit larger than you would find in chimpanzees and quite a snouty skull what they have in common in different ways. It's not exactly the same as a chimpanzee snout, there's all kinds of technical ways why that is slightly different but it makes that snouty appearance. So small brain bigger snout. Interestingly enough below the chin, below the rest of the body, very importantly all species of Australopithecus, the specific genus name for that part of the group, they all have signs that when on the ground they were bipedal,

they walked upright. So small canines and being bipedal certainly makes them part of our group of being a hominin as part of that whole club so it's sort of a mix it's a bit of a character to say well it's sort of a bipedally adapted chimpanzee because then many of my colleagues would instantly say oh yeah but what about this or what about that but it's to some extent there is something in that and of course in that group there are major differences. And I should say that although the canines are small, there is, particularly in the early ones, there seems to be a substantial difference between the sexes, what you call sexual dimorphic.

So the males are substantially larger than females, perhaps all the way up to the level that you might see in gorillas. Now, before we go on to these earliest australopiths, set the scene a bit more for us. So, let's say roughly four, three million years ago, whereabouts in the world do we know that australopiths were living? Also briefly in time, because between four and two million broadly, that's interesting and sounds very long ago. But if we actually realize

that the estimated time frame for human evolution runs between approximately seven million years ago until zero until where we are now then the time period that we talk about is still in the younger half of all of that so between four and seven there's a whole almost as long period of time before that maven between seven and between four and eight million we don't know exactly when our lineage and the lineage with the chimpanzee when that split exactly different gases and they can vary a million year here or there so this is still we were talking about a later part of human evolution and we actually know very little about that early part has everything to do with just not finding the right fossils in those days.

Okay, before 2 million years ago, all of human evolution happened in Africa. We really don't have any credible fossils. Some claims have been made for certain specimens, but no credible evidence that any hominins actually lived outside Africa. Strictly speaking, before something like 1.9 or whatever. Let's say 2 million because you of course can't find everything. So when we talk about 4 to 2 million, then we clearly talk about Africa. The earliest species of Australopithecus we find in Ethiopia and Kenya and Tanzania.

So the sort of the three countries that are directly associated with the rift valley that runs in eastern Africa the eastern rift in part because you also have a branch going towards Uganda so that's the older part should not be confused with the question where did they actually really lived because this is just a place where we find the fossils a later group we find cave sites in South Africa, and that tends on the whole, by most conventional ways of looking at the dating that we've done for those fossils, they are a younger, a somewhat younger group.

So there's a cluster around the Rift Valley. Those are open air sites where animals died in riverbeds or on lake margins or any of these sort of settings and were buried in sandstone. They're well dated because in between the sandstone and claystone you get volcanic ash that you can date really well. That's why we really know how old all these things are. And in South Africa it's not open air, it's in caves and that makes the dating a lot more

difficult. That's why there's a lot of debate how old these things really are and that's just a different setting now you can ask what about the rest of africa well actually as we shouldn't be naive about this and think well human ancestors only lived in east africa and remarkably in a little patch in south africa close to or between johannesburg and Pretoria because this is the self-named cradle of humankind that sits there in between but it's just because that's where the caves are that were explored. And a nice indication when we talk about Australopithecus is that a number of decades ago a French team

found Australopithecus fossils right in the middle of the Sahara in Chad. Wow. They also found much older fossils there that are seven million years ago. Then you're really at the beginning. That's not the topic that we talk about today, but they also found three and a half million year old fossils, same age as some of these older ones from Ethiopia and Tanzania. And it shows that thousands of miles away from, or kilometers away from, where we knew Australopithecus lived, suddenly it pops up in the middle of the Sahara. Just because the right person was at the right place in between the sandstorms, horrible place to work, in between the sandstorms they explore fossils and they find a piece of lower jaw that is clearly a hominin and you know it can be debated if it's a separate species or

not. But it is a good illustration that Australopithecus probably lived all over Africa. Maybe in different environments but we should as a default imagine that most human ancestors lived in large parts of Africa and not just where we find them. It is a great point to mention, and I love how you highlighted how, you know, this is almost at the halfway stage of the human evolution story, if we believe that divergence occurs seven or eight million years ago. But it's also really interesting from what you're highlighting there about what might have preceded Australopiths. Do we have any idea about, from the evidence that we have so far, no doubt more will come out in the future, but do we have any idea how australopiths

almost they come about? Do we know what they evolved from? Yes, there are some candidates, although because they're so sparse from Ethiopia, actually from the same area where perhaps the most famous Australopithecus species, Australopithecus afarensis, including the skeleton Lucy, was found. Broadly in that same area, older material that is older than 4 million was found and then later on even things that were older than 5 million. They are assigned to different genus and species, Ardipithecus and then one or two species. Particularly in the skeleton, they show more signs of ape-like behavior, ways of going around. But they still have evidence for being upright on the ground. And that may be a potential ancestor.

Now, there are also colleagues who might say, well, no, let's first debate if this is actually a group that even sits on our lineage in a broader sense. So the further back you go in time, the more difficult it becomes, not only because we have far fewer fossils, but also because these fossils start looking more and more what you would call primitive or archaic, more like the last common ancestor with chimpanzees. And it becomes more and more difficult to decide whether they really sit on our lineage yes or no. It's not a given that anything that was bipedal in the past must automatically sit on our line, on our broader group, within our broader group, on our lineage. It might well be possible that six million years ago or something there were multiple experiments in being bipedal but there is a potential ancestor around in Ethiopia but I would always warn against connecting the dots you find

three different things and if you line three things up in time then you have a line and it's very tempting that's the history of the study of human evolution initially when you have a few things you can put it on a perfect line what what descends from what, and off you go, you have a nice linear model from something very primitive to something that looks like us. This is actually a good moment, if I may, to highlight that point. We talked about Australopithecus found in Eastern Africa, in South Africa, but the history of the discovery of this seemingly upright walking ape, it's not really an ape in the traditional thing but it was the way it was perceived initially, actually

focuses on South Africa. It is in South Africa in the 1920s that paleontologists and anthropologists started to get interested in finds that were made in cave sites and in particular a baby skull or a juvenile skull so it's a about a three-year-old child's skull was found somewhere in a quarry was brought to the anatomy department in Johannesburg and was by Raymond Dart an anatomist there he was recognized as something that was not simply a fossil chimpanzee, but he looked at the position of the hole in the back of the head where the spinal cord goes in, and he noticed that was really coming from underneath rather than from the back, and concluded that it was an upright creature. And he also recognized quite in a revolutionary way a few other things why he said

this is a human ancestor. No idea how old old it was but it was certainly more primitive looking than any other ancestors they knew about he called it in 1925 in the journal nature he named it australopithecus afarensis australopithecus the southern ape africanus yeah and from africa so australopithecus africanus was met with an enormous amount of skepticism, partly because it was a baby. And as we all know, when we look at cute pictures of chimpanzee babies, they look oh so much more human. So it was rightfully a criticism to say, it's all nice and well to look at a baby skull

and then say, doesn't it look human-like and less, or at least more towards human rather than chimpanzee-like. So for decades it was not really that much accepted until far more material was found closer to Johannesburg in a series of caves with rather nice names like Sturkfontein and Swartkrans and those were all cave sites that were explored to get the minerals out and as a by-product these fossil bones were found in fissures in between the rock and those were all cave sites that were explored to get the minerals out. And as a byproduct, these fossil bones were found in fissures in between the rock. And adults were found and also bones from the rest of the body were found,

including very importantly at some stage in the site of Sterkfontein, they found a pelvis and some vertebrae. And they also started finding some thigh bones and this sort of things that clearly demonstrated i think beyond reasonable doubt i would say that this was a bipedal creature this was not an ape straightforward so it was in the ultimately looking back probably in the early 50s that australopithecus was really recognized as a full-blown member of our broader group the hominins and now coming back to this idea that it's easy to make a tree an evolutionary tree if you have few data points so at that time already since the very beginning of the 20th century late 19th century homo erectus was known and was

recognized as an ancestor people didn't really know how old it was but globally around the 1 million mark maybe. And then you had Neanderthals which were clearly much more human-like but that was sort of was closer to us. But you had Homo erectus as the oldest species known and now you had Australopithecus so you now just had a beautiful situation where you envisage sort of how to at that time all the great apes and humans split their ways then you had Australopithecus africanus you had Homo erectus and then you had Homo sapiens that may or may not include Neanderthals or you had separately Homo Neanderthalensis very simple straight line this is basically what you see when you see a cartoon of human evolution with all the little men

you just add a few men in in between and women hopefully to create this but of course the more finds you do the more difficult it gets more and more fossils were found there was actually a different branch of the australopiths was found as well that was very specialized with crests on their head and whatever also in south africa it's not really again the full topic for this podcast but it stays sort of stable for a long time. These caves were explored, were excavated until I think you now have to sort of fast forward. One of those australopiths like those robust, those crested australopiths was found in 1959 in Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. That was really quite a shock, was the first time that anything

related to this group was found outside South Africa. Mary and Louis Leakey found this after many decades of work in Olduvai Gorge, mostly finding stone tools. But apart from Handyman Habelus they also found this Nutcracker Man. Nutcracker Man, Paranthropus. Yeah, Paranthropus, Paranthropusisei, it was named. They found it. Then at the same time in Kenya, Richard Leakey started later on, sort of in the very late 60s,

started to poke around Lake Turkana and started finding more of these robust ones. But then very importantly, a French-American team in the early 70s started to work in the Afar Tri triangle in Ethiopia. The sites have been known in part for quite a long time by the French who had done a lot of paleontology in that area and so more and more specimens were found but then they really struck gold in the Afra triangle by finding really quite nice material and that material included the famous skeleton Lucy and various other things.

And so Australopithecus in Eastern Africa really came on the map at that time. So what is the story? Therefore, let's delve into Lucy now. So Australopithecus afarensis, of all the Australopithecus, this one always seems to be the big one, or at least the most well-known one.

What is the story, therefore, behind first the discovery of Afarensis and then in particular the finding of Lucy, this so well-known very early hominin skeleton? There's two sides to that. A, of course it was figured out because we're now in Eastern Africa and we have even in those days it already became possible to sort of get some dating out of these ash layers so it became clear that these were fossils that were older than anything that was found in or thought about the age in South Africa so it was older it was more primitive looking so they were more primitive looking in some respects than in South Africa and particularly the skeleton Lucy was a partial skeleton actually the

the head part was not overly impressive because they had much nicer fossils of the skull but there was nevertheless was a mandible and little bits and bobs of the cranial vault but what was special about it and that's always nice it didn't come alone it was a package it came with limb bones and other things as well. Not super complete, I always forget the percentage, might be 40% or whatever, but there were limb bones, there was part of the pelvis again, was already highlighted, the pelvis very important to identify if something is upright walking or not. So there were a lot of interesting clues about the

biology and it showed that this was an upright walking little creature because this Lucy was really pretty tiny. And on the other hand the fossils were old so this was sort of our oldest human ancestor and a lot became known from a large cache of fossils not only Lucy but lots of other parts as well that that were found. A new area was explored so lots of fossils laying on the surface, really treasure trove and you could say rightfully so it became very well known but what helped enormously with that is that the American who represented the American French team initially what eventually largely became an American team, a person called Don Johansson, who started off doing his PhD at the time, but very quickly developed into a very skilled team leader

and assembled a group of specialists. He was very savvy when it came to media, so he got himself in all the right media and sold it extremely well. A book about Lucy was translated in many languages, and he did that very well sort of all boys history of roaming around the landscape finding this and what can you that's what made it interesting what can you almost like a detective a Sherlock Holmes story what can you deduce from those bones how was it walking how was it eating everything so it became very attractive there was

a whole social thing around it they discovered indeed that the males were larger than the females what does that mean for how they lived because when you see that among primates that males are substantially larger than females which you find in gorillas orangutans baboons but for instance not in chimpanzees not in gibbons that says often something about the sexual relationships. So all these sexual dimorph species, very often there is a patriarch, one silverback male in the case of gorilla with multiple females, whereas in chimpanzees and bonobos it's more fluid and etc. etc. So you could weave a whole social story around it as well.

But the most important thing of all was this is an older species than anything we know. And it's primitive, it's old, but it's also a little bit like you and me. You could see them walk in the landscape. And to make that even more important, Mary Leakey, who we encountered because she was actually the person who found Nutcracker Man together with her husband, Louis. After Louis died, she continued to work in Tanzania and she worked in a place called Laetoli and she started finding Australopithecus fossils and they were actually at least as old as what was found in Ethiopia, perhaps even somewhat older.

She looked for a skillful, young, enthusiastic person to help describe these fossils and on recommendations from various colleagues. It was a young Tim White who was a PhD student in the US. He had already done some fieldwork in Kenya with Richard Leakey's team but he went over and he worked on describing the fossils that Mary Leakey found in Litole. And he and the other enthusiastic and media savvy PhD student, Don Johansson, they started talking to each other and comparing fossils. I have my fossils from Tanzania and Don Johansson had his fossils from Hadar, the site Hadar in the Afar Triangle. the site Hadar within the Afar triangle. And sitting down, they sort of, you know, figured out together that this was,

both of them were different from Australopithecus africanus in South Africa, which was not immediately accepted, certainly not by the South Africans, who didn't want to lose their position at sort of the most early ancestor. So it encountered some resistance there. But they also concluded, concluded actually what we found in Tanzania and Ethiopia despite the distance between them is probably the same species or actually next step it is the same species. Don Johansson for a while had actually figured out that there were two species represented there something more homo looking and something more primitive australopithecus looking but in the end they

came to the conclusion there was one species and this was eventually in the late 70s was published 78 i think it was published in a very understated way in the museum journal of the cleveland museum as a new species australopithecus afarensis so not australopithecus africanus, but Australopithecus afarensis, because the largest cluster came from Afar. Now, the specimen, the fossil to which they link this species, every species in the world is linked with sort of an archetypal fossil. Oh, is this the holotype? The holotype, very good.

So they chose a holotype, very, I would almost say facetiously. They didn't take, because it's called Australopithecus afarensis, they didn't take a nice fossil, Lucy perhaps or something else, a nice fossil from Ethiopia, from Afar. No, they took a mandible, a lower jaw from Tanzania, but it got the name Afarensis. The way they did that was linking that Tanzanian group intrinsically with the Ethiopian cache of fossils so really linking together. Mary Leakey who felt that it's yes it was also what she had from Tanzania that Tim White worked on is an Australopithecus form but it is different from Ethiopia and so she declined to be part of the official article and it was you know quite a falling out. But from that moment

onwards Tim White having come from the Tanzanian end and Don Johansen and team from the Ethiopian end became really joined up forces and became a very formidable team, foremost initially to prove to the world that their fossils were different from what they had in South Africa. On Gone Medieval from History Hit, we set out to solve the biggest mysteries of the medieval age. So many of these travellers who went out looking for Presta John, what did they think they were hearing? Using science to identify our buried ancestors. Genetic signatures found in present day Ashkenazi Jewish populations

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So that's so interesting. So it's actually, from what you're saying, so it's a few years after the famous discovery of Lucy that people like Tim White and Dom Johansson, they start to realize that there is more than one species of Australopithecus. Yeah. That is so interesting. That actually happens after the discovery of Lucy. Yes, well, Lucy was just part of a whole group of fossils.

They were all for it, but it took a while until the official Australopithecus afarensis name was published. And as I said, there was pushback from the South Africans in particular to say, well, yes, it is a different form, but it might be a subspecies. So it might be Australopithecus africanus afarensis as subspecies are rarely used in paleoopithecus africanus afarensis as a subspecies are rarely used in paleoanthropology, but there were some proposals.

There were also people, just like Don Johansen had originally envisaged, who said, particularly from the French contingent that still was a little bit involved, they did their own studies and they said, no, this is not one species. Indeed, there are, if we look at the limb bones for instance we can clearly see two different groups one more ape-like one more human-like so they didn't accept at the time that it was just simple one species okay bring forward the time and more and more fossils were found more complete skulls were found eventually and it's by now it's almost sort of a given there's very

few people in the world who would doubt that Osopythicus afarensis is one in the same one in the same species and for a very long time basically until mid-90s but actually I would almost say until this millennium it was also accepted that that was the oldest known species. It was sort of the mother of us all, the whole aspect of Lucy and, you know, the origin of humans, whatever. It all sort of nicely fitted together. I should add one thing that I haven't mentioned yet, which is nevertheless very important. Apart from finding these rather more fragmentary fossils of Australopithecus, let's say Australopithecus afarensis indeed, in Tanzania, in the same area, they found ash layers that had footprints in them.

Ash layers that turned out to be around 3.7 million years old. So the fossils in Tanzania are indeed older than the ones in Ethiopia. So in Ethiopia, they are approximately between, let's say, 3 million and 3.4 million, maybe a little bit, some of them a little bit older. Whereas in Tanzania, they are between 3.6 and 3.8. But at 3.7, there's an ash layer, there are multiple ash layers with footprints in them, not just human ancestors, creatures that clearly walked on two legs but absolutely everything you can dream of anything from i would almost say from ants to elephants left in the fresh fallen ash that subsequently was consolidated by rain that made a perfect cement and perhaps because of being

spooked by the eruption of the volcano that produced the ash. There were lots of animals on the move and they walked through this nice fine grain cement and they left their footprints. And it's an absolute treasure trove but most importantly here you had the oldest evidence of something that must be human ancestors of some sort leaving their imprints and there's at least one set of imprints where there's the impression that it might be a larger and a smaller individual walking side by side maybe with another one as well and of course yes the media and people's imagination went in overdrive so this was a male and a female sort of walking hand in hand through the landscape

escaping the volcanic explosion but it contributed to this whole aura around it. And this was indeed sort of the first family. This was the first, you know, everything first in the context of human evolution. It is so extraordinary, actually, when we are thinking of those timescales. You say footprints from more than 3 million years ago. That is insane. But does it all add to the picture that, and as mentioned, there'll be more, no doubt, being discovered in the years ago. That is insane. But as it all adds to the picture that, and as mentioned, there'll be more no doubt being discovered in the years ahead. But actually, when it comes to australopiths,

we might think initially of Lucy, because that's the well-known name, the well-known skeleton. But there are so many more fossils of australopiths that have been found. Actually, for this species, deep in human prehistory, we actually have quite a lot of visible physical evidence of them surviving off. Yes, no, absolutely. And one very important contribution to that is that in the 90s, Mivliki, who had taken over all the fieldwork exercises from her husband Richard, started to explore areas on the western side of Lake Turkana in Kenya. And she found fossils that were assigned and still accepted as being Australopithecus but that were over 4 million years ago.

Meanwhile sort of a spin-off of the same team also worked on the east side of Lake Turkana in some bone beds and there they found what is generally seen as the same species, a little under 4 million but older than Australopithecus afarensis and this was named as the same species, a little under 4 million but older than Australopithecus afarensis and this was named as a new species Australopithecus anamensis. And later studies where the Kenyan and Ethiopian teams started working together and compare notes and compare fossils all together really became very clear that Australopithecus anamensis and then afarensis through the different ages, because the oldest afarensis is from Tanzania and the younger ones are from Ethiopia, but you can actually put them on the table.

And in this case, as skeptical as I am for lining everything up in one lineage, in this case, you could say that there's a lot of good evidence that this was one long evolving line. Much later on, far more recently, other teams from the states by by the originally Ethiopian scholar Johannes Heider Selassie they found fossils who fill the gaps in between even and you can literally they have some fossils where they say you know we have all these teeth all these bits of mandible but we really scratch ourselves on the head is this now afarensis or is this now anamensis? It has a bit of a mix of everything, so it all sort of follows through. They now doubt us again because they, for the

first time, found a beautiful cranium of Australopithecus anamensis in Ethiopia, which seems to be relatively young and might have been walking around in Ethiopia at the same time when proper afarensis was already around. But that sort of remains to be seen. Broadly speaking, this lineage from Anamensis, which was also subsequently found by Tim White, who already figured in Ethiopia, about 4.2 million are the oldest fossils of Australopithecus anamensis, 4.2, all the way up to 3 million. You have a, in Eastern Africa a sort of a nicely evolving line of australopithecus well i must also ask before we start wrapping up i could ask him so many things

we'll go on to tools later so i won't talk about them being a tool user or a tool maker but because our thoughts are always sometimes linked to lucy just because of the popular perception of australopithecus but there have been so many decades since then the discovery of so many fossils as you've hinted at now we're learning more about this kind of sequence of australopiths are there any other striking this skeleton discoveries of australopiths that have been found and I'm thinking maybe in particular I can see an image behind you of a national geographic of you probably know I'm talking about from Dikika which seems to be a interesting, more recent discovery of an australopith.

Yes, and that's rather personal for me because I was part of the team describing this baby that's really... So the first specimen, the first fossil that was ever described as australopithecus was a three-year-old child from South Africa. And this is also a child, but now from Ethiopia, very close to Hadar where all these other things were found in a place indeed called Tikika. It's a child that's approximately the same age. It's a bit like Lucy itself, but A, it has a complete skull,

meaning a cranium, the upper part, and a mandible. It had a complete brain case, and where the brain case is a little bit missing, you can just see a beautiful impression of the brain underneath. It's so well preserved that it was found as it fossilized upside down and on its palate. So if you feel with your tongue upwards in your mouth that's your palate of course and if you imagine the skull is upside down. On there was a very funny looking little bit of bone. It looked a bit more like a potato

crisp or something like that. And what that was, was actually what is known as a tongue bone, a hyois bone. It is a piece of bone that sits in your throat, in your larynx, sort of under your chin. And because it's not really well attached to the rest of the skeleton, it's very rarely ever found, but has potentially a lot of meaning because it's all associated with indeed with your larynx and producing sounds and therefore immediately people think about okay how do you vocalize what about language all of these things a few of these bones had ever been found of the old neonatal or something similar but nothing ever for Australopithecus. So here was this whole skull including a hyoid bone still, but also there was a complete

rib cage underneath, all ribs still more or less in place and the vertical column and then there were also pieces of the limbs, upper limbs and lower limbs. You know, not complete in pieces but the rib cage was complete absolutely marvelous so it was found the leader of the team who found this this fossil Zerai Alamseged an Ethiopian who initially did his PhD in France and then went to the US and continued to do field work in Ethiopia he was looking initially for ways to sort of visualize what was going on inside this fossil this very complete fossil beautiful computer tomography ct scanning is the answer for this ever since the 1980s we know that this is a great way to work and it happens that i sort of helped pioneer this

technique because i did my phd on inner ears inside the cranium. And after that, I had actually helped the National Museums of Kenya to set up a CT scanning program. And so when Zerai Alamsegat sort of started asking around who can help me with finding a CT scanner, who can CT scan this, and also help to operate the scanner and deal with the images that come out, he ended up contacting me. And we've worked together ever since. We brought this fantastic Dikika fossil initially to Nairobi because that's where some really good

scanners are available, more than in Addis Ababa at the time, now that's different. So we scanned it there, we could make 3D imaging and the whole shebang, you know, see how large the brain was. Because it's a young individual, many of the adult teeth are still inside the bone that you couldn't see, but we could actually then look inside the bone and see the teeth. Yes, it eventually ended up being described in nature. Not just things like the complete brain of a growing youngster, you could say, and a high wood bone that says something about vocalization but also for instance the very first shoulder blade intact shoulder blade was found which was

remarkably gorilla like and that touches on an important thing the the questions about how did usurpithecus actually move around we clearly advocated in the original article that usurpithecus was bipedal on the ground of course but when also spent time in trees and had upper limbs and the shoulders and everything that were pretty good at climbing still so that was yes that was published and it's very cute and National Geographic ordered a nice reconstruction so that was definitely very interesting subsequently we actually later on we brought it to an even better CT scanner with so-called synchrotron scanning, very very sophisticated, where we could look not only inside the skull but we could actually look inside the teeth

themselves. And the enamel, the glassy parts of your teeth, have growth lines inside that are just like rings in a tree and by counting these growth lines of the teeth specialists can then actually figure out how old the individual really was we had originally thought it would be around three year old and it turned out to be even younger so something like two points i can't remember now exactly 2.7 whatever and and lots of really interesting biology we could do because it was a nice package of so much information about the head and information about the trunk, what you call the thorax or the rib cage

and the bits around that. So it's been a very interesting adventure. So there's still a lot to discover. Lots to discover indeed, which was very, very interesting for the future. And it's been a fascinating episode. There's still so many other topics we could talk about. There are so many other species that we haven't really talked about, but that might have to be for another episode. But given the huge timeframe for australopiths, do we know what ultimately

happens to them? Why maybe they die out? Australopithecus as a genus, so multiple species, you could argue either they died out or they morphed, meaning they evolved to some extent perhaps into other species. But Australopithecus proper sort of died out like happens with all organisms on the planet. At some stage, you're superseded by things, out-competed, various reasons for this. things out-competed, various reasons for this. The youngest evidence for Australopithecus as a proper genus and as a species is actually from South Africa. There's a species known as Australopithecus sediba that is a little younger than two million years, so that some see that as a late surviving Australopithecus africanus. So they hang on until after two million in a few places. But of course, if you look at

literally at the landscape at that time, the genus Homo had emerged with the early species and various other ones. There's this robust group of species that we know as Paranthropus very often that are also seen as Australopiths, meaning primitive early ancestors. They actually meaning primitive early ancestors, they actually continued to walk around the earth until about 1.4, 1.3 million years ago. So they lived alongside Homo quite a bit in eastern and southern Africa. And again, yes, why they disappeared, maybe too specialized for certain diets, there's all kinds of reasons. Well, there you go.

Hopefully we'll find out more in the future as well. But it's such a fascinating area of deep human prehistory. Fred, it's always such a pleasure having you on the podcast. And it just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on today. All right. Thank you very much. Well, there you go. There was Professor Fred Spohr talking all things Australopithecus.

there was Professor Fred Spohr talking all things Australopithecus. I hope you enjoyed that episode where we've gone back more than three million years to Africa. It is such a fascinating area of human evolution and I'm loving learning more about it. I hope you are too. Now last things from me, you know what I'm going to say, but if you are enjoying the ancients recently, you've been enjoying our latest string of episodes since our Babylon miniseries, well, don't you worry, we've got some more corkers lined up over the next few weeks. I'm really excited to share them with you all. You can leave us a lovely rating on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts from. There is no better cause in ancient history world

than to share these stories with you and as many people as possible. But that's enough from me, and I will see you in the next episode.