Australopithecus Sediba Arrived After Homo Already Lived

A nine-year-old found Australopithecus sediba in August 2008, and the skeletons remain among the most complete early human fossils in Africa. Geologists later dated them to 1.977 million years, after early Homo already appears in Ethiopia.

Lee Berger’s team named the species for a wellspring and argued it sat on the path into our genus. The tighter date, and older Homo jaws to the north, left that path looking like a side trail.

A Collarbone Beside a Burned Tree

On August 1, 2008, paleoanthropologist Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand turned down a miners’ track he had passed for years in the Cradle of Humankind, northwest of Johannesburg, and found a small blasted pit with animal bone. He came back on August 15 with his son Matthew, then nine, and their dog Tau.

Matthew chased the dog into high grass beside a lightning-struck tree, tripped, and shouted that he had found a fossil. Berger, whose doctorate had included work on hominin clavicles, saw the S-curve of a collarbone in a block of breccia. When he turned the block, a canine and part of a jaw stuck out of the other side.

I didn’t really know what was happening because I’d never found a hominid. I was just there for fun. But my dad was so excited, and so obviously that made me excited.

Matthew Berger, recalling the Malapa find

Job Kibii, a colleague on the walk, was there for the first look. The site sits about 15 km north-northeast of Sterkfontein, Swartkrans, and Kromdraai. Berger named it Malapa, homestead in seSotho. Lime miners had already torn the cave; the block Matthew picked up had likely been thrown out of the hole decades earlier.

THE WEEK MALAPA OPENED

1. August 1, 2008: Berger locates the blasted pit on a miners’ track and notes animal fossils worth a return visit.
2. August 15, 2008: Matthew Berger finds the clavicle block beside a burned tree; the reverse face holds a hominin tooth and jaw.
3. Later in 2008: Berger and Kibii recover a second partial skeleton, an adult female, from the pit itself.
4. April 9, 2010: Berger, Kibii, Darryl de Ruiter, Steven Churchill, Peter Schmid, Kristian Carlson, and Paul Dirks name Australopithecus sediba.

The juvenile became Malapa Hominin 1, MH1, a boy whose second molars were already in occlusion, close to adult brain size. The adult female became MH2. Both had been buried in a single debris flow that hardened soon after, which limited scavengers and left bones in an unusual state of association.

Berger Named the Species a Wellspring

The 2010 description in Science reported two partial skeletons, with skull and tooth remains, that the authors said could not be fitted into any named fossil species. They established a new species of Homo-like australopith on a mix of old and new traits in the skull and the rest of the skeleton.

Australopithecus means southern ape. Sediba is a Sesotho word for fountain or wellspring. MH1 is the holotype, the specimen the name rests on. The team argued the species most likely descended from older Australopithecus africanus and shared more advanced features with early Homo than any other australopith then known, so it might illuminate the shift into our genus.

Donald Johanson, who found the Lucy skeleton in Ethiopia, looked at the thin lower jaw and said, “It’s Homo.” Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London warned that dropping the fossils into Homo would force a major redefinition of that genus. Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley, went further the other way.

Given its late age and Australopithecus-grade anatomy, it contributes little to the understanding of the origin of genus Homo.

Tim White, paleoanthropologist, University of California, Berkeley

Ron Clarke at Witwatersrand thought the bones might be a late form of A. africanus, or a sister to it. The argument was already split on publication day: a child’s collarbone had produced one of the best early skeletons on the continent, and a claim the rest of the field was not ready to grant.

1.977 Million Years Is Too Late for Homo

Age is the lever. In 2010, Dirks and colleagues placed the bones in water-laid cave sediment above a flowstone dated 2.026 plus or minus 0.021 million years, inside a reversed-to-normal magnetic pattern they tied to the Olduvai Subchron, and beside animals that lived in Africa between about 2.36 and 1.50 million years ago. That first range was 1.95 to 1.78 million years.

A year later, newly exposed flowstone capping the fossil unit let geologist Robyn Pickering of the University of Melbourne and colleagues tighten the clock. Uranium-lead dates on thin uranium-rich layers, plus the magnetic signature of the sediment, assigned the bones to the brief Pre-Olduvai excursion. The paper gave 1.977 plus or minus 0.002 million years, a window of 2,000 years. The authors wrote that this still predated the earliest uncontested Homo in Africa, so the species could not be ruled out as an ancestor on age alone.

Uncontested did not stay still. In 2015, a partial jaw from Ledi-Geraru in Ethiopia, LD 350-1, was assigned to Homo at 2.80 to 2.75 million years. In August 2025, the same field area produced more Homo teeth at 2.78 and 2.59 million years, alongside a separate Australopithecus that is not afarensis. East Africa already had Homo, and more than one australopith, hundreds of thousands of years before Malapa’s wellspring.

HOW THE DATES LINE UP

Andrew Du and Zeresenay Alemseged put numbers on that gap in 2019. Using 2.8 to 2.75 million years for earliest Homo and 1.977 million years for Malapa, they treated the lag as 800,000 years, or 0.8 million years, and calculated about a 0.09 percent chance of finding an ancestor’s fossil horizon that much younger than its descendant’s. They concluded it is highly unlikely that A. sediba is ancestral to Homo, and that Australopithecus afarensis remains the more viable candidate.

Berger’s group had already answered the calendar objection with a different move. Because sediba is known from one dated site, they argued, its true span is unknown. In a 2018 thought experiment they placed Malapa as a last appearance, a midpoint, or a first appearance, which pushed a hypothetical start as far back as 2.95 million years. That older start would overlap earliest Homo. It is a possible range, not a measured one. No sediba fossil older than Malapa has been published.

Walking Hips on Climbing Arms

The skeletons are why the claim was tempting. MH1’s skull has small premolars and molars and a face that looks more like Homo than like older australopiths, with less jut, a weaker brow, and a hint of chin. The same head still holds an australopith brain. The 2010 team estimated a minimum of 420 cubic centimeters; later work put the range at 420 to 440 cubic centimeters, ordinary for the genus and far below early Homo.

The Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program lists MH1 as a juvenile male around 1.3 meters tall as a juvenile, with a small body and long arms. Body-mass estimates for the Malapa individuals fall around 30 to 36 kilograms. Sexual dimorphism looks closer to living people than to the most size-skewed australopiths, which is a surprise given how small both skeletons are.

A 2011 scan of MH1’s braincase found an australopith-sized organ with a more human-like orbitofrontal region behind the eyes. The pelvis already shows derived, Homo-like architecture even though the adult brain was still small, which undercuts the old idea that wider birth canals had to wait for bigger infant heads. The rest of the body did not follow in lockstep.

THE BODY THAT CONFUSED THE FIELD

• The head: Small teeth and a less projecting face sit on a brain of 420 to 440 cubic centimeters.
• The hips: Derived pelvic shape appears before any jump in brain size.
• The arms: Long upper limbs, with a complete set from MH2, stay primitive and well suited to climbing.
• The back: Added lumbar bones show lordosis and a pyramidal facet pattern used in upright walking.
• The size: Roughly 30 to 36 kilograms, below most specimens assigned to early Homo.

In 2021, Scott Williams and colleagues described new lumbar vertebrae from breccia on an old mining road about 2 meters north of the main pit. Those bones completed a nearly complete lower back of MH2. The adult female had a curved lumbar column like living women and could walk upright with ease. The upper limbs, described in the 2013 Science set, still look like a climber’s. Hip, knee, and ankle also support two-legged walking. The creature stood, and it still had a reason to go up a tree.

By 2011 the team had more than 220 bones from at least six individuals, including babies. Prepared scientific papers first concentrated on MH1, MH2, and an adult tibia labelled MH4. That is an extraordinary sample for this time range, richer in associated skeletons than the early Homo record it was supposed to explain.

Why Many Scientists Reject the Ancestor Claim

Two problems stacked. The calendar problem is the cleaner one: a species sampled only at 1.977 million years is a poor parent for a genus already present by 2.8 million years, unless older sediba is found. The anatomy problem is messier. William Kimbel argued the resemblance to A. africanus is so strong that sediba is a sister species on a South African side branch, not a unique relative of Homo. Bernard Wood called that reading spot on. Ian Tattersall agreed that neither africanus nor sediba is ancestral to early Homo.

Part of the fight is that MH1 is a juvenile. Kimbel and Yoel Rak have argued that some of the Homo-like face would have been lost with adult growth, leaving a head hard to tell from A. africanus. De Ruiter has said computational growth projections of the same skull point the other way. In 2015 Yoel Rak and Ella Been even asked whether MH1 and MH2 mix bones from two genera, a claim that did not become the field’s working model but shows how unstable the association still looks to some eyes.

WHERE EXPERTS DISAGREE

• Berger’s team: The mix of derived skull, teeth, pelvis, and hand traits makes sediba the best candidate then known for a position near the origin of Homo, or at least a close sister.
• White, Clarke, Kimbel, Wood: Late age plus australopith-grade bodies make a late A. africanus or an africanus sister, with little to say about how Homo began.
• Du and Alemseged: A 0.8-million-year lag after earliest Homo makes ancestry highly unlikely; A. afarensis is the better parent on present evidence.

A 2023 craniodental study led by Carrie Mongle could not reject closest ties to Homo on the characters it used, and treated sediba as a plausible dead-end of a lineage that shared an earlier common ancestor with Homo. That is a cousin, not a parent. The paper also warned that an adult sediba skull, or a score that includes the limbs, could flip the tree again. Popular recaps still call the 2008 find a missing link. The specialist literature does not.

South Africa at 2 million years was already crowded. Sediba lived on a relatively flat mix of grassland and woodland, at the same time as Paranthropus robustus and Homo ergaster, also called Homo erectus, in the Cradle. A late australopith with a human-looking face can be a parallel experiment. It does not have to be the wellspring the name promised.

New Bones Are Still Coming Out of Malapa

The site did not freeze in 2010. On September 3, 2025, Berger posted that preparator Zandile Ndaba had exposed the palate of MH1 in near-pristine condition, including the transverse palatine suture, rock that had not seen air in nearly 2 million years. The same update showed an adult foot from Malapa in near articulation, and mentioned baby remains still coming out, alongside work at Gladysvale and Rising Star.

On April 9, 2026, sixteen years after the species paper, Berger wrote that more sediba news was coming that year.

16 years ago today! More news on sediba coming this year… pic.twitter.com/HAGbtVdAiL

— Lee R Berger (@LeeRberger) April 9, 2026

Matthew, now an adult, has talked through the morning of August 15, 2008, in interviews, still describing himself as a child who was there for fun. The collarbone he tripped over remains one of the stranger origin stories in the field. It opened a species with a wellspring for a name, a date tighter than almost anything of its age, and a family-tree argument that later East African jaws made harder, not easier.

The bones keep arriving. The parent of Homo is still not among the ones with a settled label.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Does the Name Australopithecus Sediba Mean?

Sediba is a Sesotho word for fountain or wellspring, chosen because the authors thought the fossils might sit at the origin of Homo. Australopithecus, southern ape, is the genus Raymond Dart coined in 1925 for the Taung Child from South Africa, so the new species was placed in a name already tied to that country. Malapa, the cave, means homestead in seSotho and is a separate word from the species name.

Which Fossil Is the Holotype of Australopithecus Sediba?

The holotype is Malapa Hominin 1, catalogued as UW88-1, the juvenile male whose right clavicle Matthew Berger picked up on August 15, 2008. A holotype is the single specimen a species name is legally anchored to; later finds can be referred to the species but do not replace that anchor. MH2, the adult female, is the paratype, the second specimen designated in the original description.

How Did Researchers Pin the Age to 2,000 Years?

They dated a flowstone cap above the fossil sand with uranium-lead on thin layers that average about 0.4 parts per million of uranium, then matched the sand’s normal magnetic polarity to the Pre-Olduvai excursion, a flip estimated at about 3,000 years long around 1.977 million years ago. Only that short normal episode sits between 1.95 million years and the Huckleberry Ridge event at about 2.05 to 2.03 million years, which is why the error bar shrank to 0.002 million years.

Were More Bones Added After the 2010 Paper?

Yes. The 2013 Science package added detailed studies of the braincase, pelvis, hand, foot, and limbs, and treated an isolated adult tibia as MH4. In 2021, four lumbar vertebrae from breccia on a twentieth-century mining road and dump north of the main pit were fitted to MH2, giving that female a nearly complete lower back and a clearer case for lumbar curvature in upright walking.

Who Found the Adult Female Skeleton?

Lee Berger found MH2, the adult female paratype, in the miners’ pit itself, after Matthew’s clavicle block had already flagged the site. Kibii was with him for that recovery. MH2 lay close to MH1, and the two were later interpreted as victims of the same debris flow rather than as a burial placed by other hominins.