A BBC article reported on a robust australopithecine skull from the Drimolen site, South Africa, discovered in 2018. The skull (DNH 155), assigned to Australopithecus (Paranthropus) robustus by the research team of Martin et al., was found only metres away from where a Homo erectus child’s skull (DNH 134) was discovered in 2015. Both were ‘dated’ to allegedly about 2 million years ago.

Skulls from A. robustus are already known, so this find does not add anything remarkably new. However, looking at the skull of this specimen, as well as those of other australopithecines (e.g., A. africanus and A. afarensis), underlines the obvious fact that there was nothing human-like about them. Some may have been capable of walking upright in some manner, or adopting an upright posture, whether on the ground or in the trees. Nothing is extraordinary about this. It no more indicates they were on their way to becoming human than were some extinct tree-dwelling ‘bipedal’ apes found (as fossils) in Europe.

The australopithecines were an extinct group of diverse apish primates that were at home in the trees. Likely they represent only a few (perhaps just one) biblical kinds, and the diversity in form shows variation within the kind(s). ‘Fossil’ humans categorized as Homo erectus were likely early post-Babel humans. They made tools and may even have constructed watercraft and navigated seas during their migration to distant regions of the earth. Hence, they were very intelligent and fully human.

©123rf.com/vgstudio/Daniel Polák

• Two-million-year-old skull of human ‘cousin’ unearthed; bbc.com/news, 10 Nov 2020.
• Martin, J. M. et al., Drimolen cranium DNH 155 documents microevolution in an early hominin species, Nature Ecology & Evolution, 9 Nov 2020.