Major questions about man's origin could be answered by the discovery of an intact ape-man skeleton dating back 3.6 million years, experts said yesterday. The skeleton of the 4 ft creature embedded in rock in a South African cave is the oldest complete set of hominid fossil bones found.
Prof Chris Stringer, head of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, said: "It is a relatively complete skeleton, and anything relatively complete from this time period is going to be very important."
Mr Ron Clarke, a British palaeo-anthropologist at Witwatersrand Medical School at the Johannesburg University, and his colleague, Mr Phillip Tobias, announced the discovery yesterday in the South African Journal of Science.
They found the skull and leg bones matching foot and ankle fragments found by Mr Clarke in 1994. The skull and legs are still embedded in iron-hard rock in a cave at Sterkfontein, near Johannesburg, which is expected to yield the pelvis, vertebrae and other limb bones as workers patiently chip away the stone. It will take up to a year to free the whole skeleton.
It was discovered at Sterkfontein, a former lime quarry cave which has yielded a number of hominid skulls since the 1930s. Previously, the most complete early hominid was "Lucy", an Australopithecus whose partial skeleton was discovered in 1974 in Ethiopia. Before the Sterkfontein find a homoerectus from Kenya, dating back 1.8 million years, was the oldest complete hominid skeleton discovered.