The ‘cave woman’ fossil turns out to be 1 million years older than previously thought, researchers alter the ‘tree of life’ (photos)

These fossils, including that of an ancient cave woman known as ‘Mrs. Ples’, have been buried for thousands of years in the caves of South Africa, now known as the “Cradle of Humanity”.

Modern testing methods already suggest that this group of ancient humans roamed the earth about 3.4 or 3.7 million years ago.

This new timeline could change our worldview of human evolution.

So this means that there are many ways, and it is currently not known what was the path followed by our ancestors to return to the first species of our current race.

For years scientists believed that the species Australopithecus africanuswhose fossils have been discovered in the Sterkfontein caves near Johannesburg, were less than 2.6 million years old.

The underground cave complex that unearths more ancient human remains than anywhere else in the world – including the full skull of a cave woman found in 1947 called ‘Mrs. Ples’.

According to the Smithsonian Museum, this two-legged species was shorter than modern man. Males reached only 138cm in height while females up to about 115cm.

Already new radioactive dating techniques used by scientists suggest that the skulls of Ms. Ples, and others around her, are a million years older than previously thought.

The researchers changed the timeframe after testing earth sediments around fossils and isotopes created by cosmic rays.

It was previously believed that species that existed on earth at the time, such as the ‘Lucy monkey’, whose 3.2-million-year-old fossils were found in Africa, were the forerunners of the first man.

New suggestions may indicate that these species may have crossed with each other, complicating the lineage of human descent, and suggesting that the line of evolution has not been so simple.

This means that “our family tree is more of a shrub with many branches,” says French researcher Laurent Bruxelles, who was part of the study.

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