Australopithecus, meaning “southern ape”, was an early hominin that existed in Africa during the Late Pliocene and Early Pleistocene. The genera Homo, which includes modern humans, Paranthropus, and Kenyanthropus evolved from Australopithecus. In other words, Australopithecus were primates closely related to, if not actually ancestors of, modern human beings. For this reason, it is a crucial evolutionary link between nonhuman ape-like creatures and early human species. It is perhaps one of the richest paleoanthropological finds with fossils like “Lucy” yielding significant insights into our evolutionary past.

Species are numerous, and include Australopithecus garhi, Australopithecus africanus, Australopithecus sediba, Australopithecus afarensis, Australopithecus anamensis, Australopithecus bahrelghazali, and Australopithecus deyiremeda.

Australopithecus is known from a series of fossils found at numerous sites in eastern, north-central, and southern Africa, also known as the cradle of humankind. For the longest time, scientists believed our early ancestors arose from Europe or Asia, yet in 1924, a fossil discovery in South Africa revolutionized the perception of early human evolution, known as the Taung Child, which we will get to later in the video.

The earliest known member of the genus, Australopithecus anamensis, existed in eastern Africa around 4.2 million years ago, possessing a smaller cranial capacity than other australopithecines. Australopithecus fossils become more widely dispersed throughout eastern and southern Africa, with the Chadian Australopithecus bahrelghazali indicating the genus was much more widespread than the fossil record suggests, before eventually becoming extinct 1.9 million years ago, or 1.2 million to 600,000 years ago if Paranthropus is included, during the Pliocene and Pleistocene epochs. The validity of Paranthropus is contested, with paleoanthropologists currently debating about synonymy with Australopithecus. While none of the groups normally directly assigned to this group survived, including the subspecies, Australopithecus gave rise to living descendants: humans, or Homo, which emerged from an Australopithecus species some time between 3 and 2 million years ago. One of the greatest mysteries in paleoanthropology might be the exact species from which early Homo arose, whose discovery could notably change our view of early human evolution.