March
19
/ 2020
Amélie Beaudet / The Conversation In his book Wonderful Life, Professor Stephen Jay Gould – an evolutionary biologist, paleontologist and widely-read popular science author – described the evolution of life in the following way: Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress. Studying Australopithecus, an extinct hominin genus that represents a branch of our family tree, is an excellent way to make more sense of our bushy family tree, and understand better how species emerge, evolve and disappear. We don’t yet know the identity of Homo‘s direct ancestor, but the most likely candidate is probably one of the Australopithecus species that lived in Africa between 4 and 2
