ArticleCommunications biology2021
Sacrum morphology supports taxonomic heterogeneity of "Australopithecus africanus" at Sterkfontein Member 4.
Article in Communications biology, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Bipedalism or bipedalisms: The os coxae of StW 573.Journal of anatomy · 2026Article
- Review
- The morphological consequences of segmentation anomalies in the human sacrum.American journal of biological anthropology · 2022Article
- Sex classification using the human sacrum: Geometric morphometrics versus conventional approaches.PloS one · 2022Article
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5 authors.
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Abstract
The presence of multiple Australopithecus species at Sterkfontein Member 4, South Africa (2.07-2.61 Ma), is highly contentious, and quantitative assessments of craniodental and postcranial variability remain inconclusive. Using geometric morphometrics, we compared the sacrum of the small-bodied, presumed female subadult Australopithecus africanus skeleton Sts 14 to the large, alleged male adult StW 431 against a geographically diverse sample of modern humans, and two species of Pan, Gorilla, and Pongo. The probabilities of sampling morphologies as distinct as Sts 14 and StW 431 from a single species ranged from 1.3 to 2.5% for the human sample, and from 0.0 to 4.5% for the great apes, depending on the species and the analysis. Sexual dimorphism and developmental or geologic age could not adequately explain the differences between StW 431 and Sts 14, suggesting that they are unlikely to be conspecific. This supports earlier claims of taxonomic heterogeneity at Sterkfontein Member 4.
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