At last week’s AAPA meeting in New Orleans, a fresh analysis of the 2010 discovery named Au. sediba caused paleoanthropologist William H. Kimbel to conclude this fossil was not ancestral to the genus Homo. Kimbel is Director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University. AAPA is the American Association of Physical Anthropologists.
Earlier news accounts on this website ( see Remarkable New Fossils Found) reported the discoverer of Au. sediba, Lee Berger of the Inibersity of the Wtswatersrand in South Africa and members of his team were confident Au. sediba was a direct ancestor of Homo erectus.
Kimbel read a paper he co-authored with Yoel Rak of the University of Tel Aviv. Rak is the author of the definitive book, The Australopithecine Face.
See the Ann Gibbons report of these developments in Science