Anthropology professor Debra Bolter featured in PLOS One, Newsweek
Dr. Debra Bolter, MJC Professor of Anthropology and Honorary Researcher with the Evolutionary
Studies Institute, University of Witwatersrand in South Africa, was featured today
in the issue of PLOS ONE, the international open-access science journal, as well as
in Newsweek.
The article, entitled “Immature remains and the first partial skeleton of a juvenile Homo naledi, late Middle Pleistocene hominin from South Africa” attributes 16 postcranial elements and a partial mandible with some dentition to a single juvenile Homo naledi individual. There are very few pre-adult skeletons in the fossil record; the ability to associate the remains of an older juvenile H. naledi is a major break-through in paleoanthropology. Immature remains are critical for understanding how an extinct species matured.