March
24
/ 2021
History is peppered with stories of women who disguised themselves as men to fight in wars, to steal crowns and to topple empires. However, in this story we have an 800,000-year-old little boy who scientists have just revealed was actually a prepubescent female. A team of scientists is today explaining to the world’s media that “Sexual dimorphism is an important part of the total variability observed in the fossil record […] because the scarcity of fossils hinders an accurate assessment of the intrapopulation variability in extinct groups and, as a consequence, the sex estimation of isolated specimens.” Again, this time in our words, the lack of early human fossils has traditionally made it really hard to distinguish between males and
