1 Some Australopithecus lineage split, with one branch becoming Homo.

2 Dart christened the fossil Australopithecus Africanus, meaning the "Southern African ape".

3 This week, bones from Australopithecus Sediba are unveiled at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

4 Already the fossils suggest that Australopithecus didn’t morph suddenly into Homo, but adapted in gradual, piecemeal fashion.

5 At both sites, teeth labelled variously as Australopithecus, H. erectus and Meganthropus are most likely to be the mystery ape instead.

6 The same rules apply to the transition from Australopithecus to the third stage of our assembly.

7 There’s nothing like a good steak. And our Australopithecus afarensis ancestors apparently felt the same way.

8 The most likely toolmaker is Australopithecus garhi, the name given a skull found in 1997.

9 Australopithecus, Cro-Magnon, Neanderthal are to name but three extinct species.

10 Dart christened the fossil Australopithecus Africanus,[] meaning the'southern African ape ".

11 Many anthropologists attribute the Laetoli prints to Australopithecus afarensis, the species that includes the partial skeleton dubbed Lucy.

12 Colleagues suggest that the toolmakers of Gona were Australopithecus, but Harris thinks not.

13 One branch of the genus Australopithecus developed specializations for eating tough tubers and other hard foods—huge jaw muscles and massive back teeth.

14 But White would say there's a better question to ask: Would it be possible to derive Australopithecus from Ardipithecus parts?

15 To be exact, he found two partial skeletons, dating from between 1.78 and 1.95 million years ago, that belong to the species now known as Australopithecus sediba.

16 Their analysis included a large and diverse sample of apes, other early hominins, including Australopithecus, and modern humans of all body sizes.

17 The remains of Lucy, who belongs to the species Australopithecus afarensis, were uncovered in another part of Ethiopia in 1974.

18 The period is an especially muddled one for palaeontology, being full of fragmentary fossils that are difficult to assign either to Homo or to Australopithecus.

19 The fossil record shows that eight distinct species emerged from one hominin species, Australopithecus africanus, alive 2.7 million years ago.

20 That’s when the first skull of a human ancestor was unearthed in Africa: the Taung child, now recognized as a member of Australopithecus africanus, which lived about 3 million to 2 million years ago.

21 Its size is a chimplike 420 cubic centimeters—not at all unusual for something called Australopithecus.

22 Older footprints, dating to 3.6 million years ago found in Tanzania have been attributed to the less advanced Australopithecus afarensis.

23 With a small, advanced brain, long arms, long legs and an advanced pelvis, Australopithecus sediba is described as probably a transitional species between Australopithecus Africanus and Homo habilis.

24 The bone belongs to a cohort of the famed hominid Lucy, whose species Australopithecus afarensis roamed eastern Africa, and is the first evidence to address the question of how they got around.

25 You can see evidence of this split-level lifestyle in the bones of one of our early relatives: Lucy, the pint-sized Australopithecus who lived about 3 million years ago.

26 That can be done very accurately for all primates, and DeSilva was able to analyze a dozen Australopithecus skulls.

27 Reported in April and known from two 1.9-million-year-old skeletons discovered in a South African cave, Australopithecus sediba offers a glimpse of a hazy time in our lineage's evolution.

28 It proved to match closely with fossils Meave Leakey and her team had found at two Great Rift Valley sites in Kenya, which she would name Australopithecus anamensis.

29 Strictly speaking, our next stop on the walk through time should have been a 3.4-million-year-old site called Maka, which had yielded a jaw and some other remains of Australopithecus afarensis.

30 Lucy, also found in Africa, thrived a million years after Ardi and was of the more human-like genus Australopithecus.

31 And our Australopithecus afarensis ancestors apparently felt the same way.

32 The early hominid, which antedate the appearence of Australopithecus robustus in the archaeological record, engaged in simple tool behavior.

33 Lucy belonged to a species called Australopithecus afarensis and lived in the region around 3.2m years ago.

34 Some Australopithecus molars show no trace of microscopic cracks that hard foods should create.

35 It may take years to confirm exactly where Ardi fits in the history of human evolution. One possibility is that she is a direct ancestor of Lucy's species, Australopithecus.