“WE ARE, effectively, looking back 2 million years and watching our ancestors chew their food,” says . A palaeontologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, he shot to scientific stardom in 2010 when he discovered Australopithecus sediba, one of the most remarkable fossils of the hominin lineage known to date.
Now he, Amanda Henry of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and a team of collaborators have discovered what A. sediba ate. Main course: bark.
A. sediba is known from two skeletons uncovered in South Africa. The species shares a…
