I saw this article about this find:

http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/07/10/ancient.skull/index.html

What I want to know is if anyone knows anymore links that discuss the findings with this skull?

Was anything else discovered in the dig?

What leads the scientists to believe that it is a human ancestor, rather than a mutated or deformed primate?

Kat

You might want to pick up the latest issue of Time magazine (July 22), it has an excellent, eight page article on the find. In it, it mentions that the team found "pieces of what it believes are at least five individuals of the same species" as well as 10,000 other fossils in the area.

It's really difficult to determine which of the many relatively big-brained, erect-walking primates whose bones are turning up all the time is the human ancestor unless dna was present, and it isn't in fossils of that great age. (First of all, they're fossils: organic material has been mostly mineralized. Secondly, dna deteriorates fairly quickly (in a flash, in terms of geological time)).

Archaelogy has been a war zone since its beginnings. It's highly speculative. Many finds have claimed to be the ancestor of man, but then another find muddies the issue. It's clear that all but one, and that was the ancestral strain, became extinct.

We may well have to settle for that limited statement: one of them was the ancestor, unless new methods in the future can solve the problem for us.

Here are some of the problems faced by the archaelogist:
(1) A site may have been disturbed making dating difficult.
(2) Some fossils have been washed by streams or flash floods from their original locations (often scientists use other species, plant or animal, to help date a find.)
(3) As said before, no dna.
(4) Dating ranges are very broad from our current perspective. A species can live, leave traces, and become extinct in as little as a hundred thousand years. Sometimes the best efforts at dating a find are only accurate withing a quarter of a million years.
(5) Fossils are only left in a certain (limited) number of special cases. The living material must be covered by mud, ash or some such material before it deteriorates to dust. Then this layer must be undisturbed for millions of years. Our planet has a reactive atmoshpere and active geology. We can conclude that only a smattering of remains of early primates have been found, or will be found.