Lordy - this is gonna be a biggie - lock & load gentlemen, let the games begin
BR>Jack
PS _ And they havent even buried the old Dutchmen yet .....
The remarkable remains of two ancient human-like creatures (hominids) have been found in South Africa.
The fossils of a female adult and a juvenile male - perhaps mother and son - are just under two million years old.
They were uncovered in cave deposits at Malapa not far from Johannesburg.
Researchers tell the journal Science that the creatures fill an important gap between older hominids and the group of more modern species known as Homo, which includes our own kind.
The team has assigned the name Australopithecus sediba to their finds.
"It's at the point where we transition from an ape that walks on two legs to, effectively, us," lead scientist Professor Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand told BBC News.
"I think that probably everyone is aware that this period of time - that period between 1.8 and just over two million years [ago] - is one of the most poorly represented in the entire early hominid fossil record. You're talking about a very small, very fragmentary record," he explained.
Rapid burial
Many scientists regard the Australopithecines as being directly ancestral to Homo but the precise placement of A. sediba in the human family tree is already proving controversial, with some scientists arguing the species may well be a Homo itself.
The Malapa creatures lived right on the cusp of the emergence of Homo species. Indeed, there are some fossils from East Africa thought to be Homo that are slightly older than the new specimens.
A. sediba has a fascinating mix of features - some archaic, some modern.
BBC News - South African fossils could be new hominid species