Abstract
FURTHER discoveries of the remains of the fossil Australopithecinæ of South Sfrica are now reported from a new site Makapansgat, almost 250 miles north of sterkrontein, where Dr. R. Broom found numbers of skulls and portions of the limb skeleton during 947 and 1948. Two of the Makapansgat, specimens, which have already been described by Prof. R. Dart in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (6, 259 and 391 ; 1948) and referred by him to a new species, A. prometheus, consist of an occipital bone and an immature mand ible. These provide additional confirmation of the inferences based on the earlier material that the Australopithecinæ show in certain anatomical features a remarkable approximation to those hitherto regarded as distinctive of the Hominidæ. For example, the disposition and extent of the nuchal crest and muscular markings on the occipital bone conform to the human rather than the simian type. The perfectly preserved and unworn anterior premolar in the immature mandible is bicuspid with the cusps of approximately equal height as in man, and thus differs markedly from the characteristic sectorial form of the lower anterior premolar in the anthropoid apes. Still more recently, there have been found at the same site a considerable part of the facial skeleton, a parietal bone, and the iliac portion of a pelvis. According to unpublished reports, the ilium, like the specimen already described by Broom (Nature, 160, 430 ; 1947), is closely similar in shape and proportions to a human ilium, and thus contrasts strongly with that of apes.
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Additional Remains of Australopithecus in South Africa. Nature 163, 630 (1949). https://doi.org/10.1038/163630d0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/163630d0