The cradle of humankind in Gauteng, South Africa, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, where a large number of early human fossils have been found. Now a dating method developed by geologists at Purdue University has pushed the age of some of the fossils found at the Teckfontein site forward by more than a million years . The study was published in the journal PNAS. The first adult Australopithecus fossil was discovered at the Teckfontein site in 1936, and it has found hundreds of Australopithecus fossils, including the famous Mrs. Ples. The researchers now find that all cave deposits containing Australopithecus fossils are between 3.4 million and 3.7 million years old, rather than the previous estimate of 2 million to 2.5 million years old. This means they are older than the Australopithecus Lucy found in Ethiopia, which is thought to have lived about 3.2 million years ago.
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