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Thanks to Anbo for suggesting Australopithecus! We'll also learn about Gigantopithecus and Bigfoot!\n\nFurther reading:\n\nAncient human relative, Australopithecus sediba, 'walked like a human, but climbed like an ape'\n\nHuman shoulders and elbows first evolved as brakes for climbing apes\n\nYou Won't Believe What Porcupines Eat\n\nPast tropical forest changes drove megafauna and hominin extinctions\n\nAn Australopithecus skeleton [photo by Em\u0151ke D\xe9nes - kindly granted by the author, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=78612761]:\n\n\n\nShow transcript:\n\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\n\nIt\u2019s officially monster month, also known as October, so let\u2019s jump right in with a topic suggested by Anbo! Anbo wanted to learn about Australopithecus, and while we\u2019re at it we\u2019re going to talk about Gigantopithecus and Bigfoot. On our spookiness rating scale of one to five bats, where one bat means it\u2019s not a very spooky episode and five bats means it\u2019s really spooky, this one is going to fall at about two bats, and only because we talk a little bit about the Yeti and Bigfoot at the end.\n\nIn 1924 in South Africa, the partial skull of a young primate was discovered. Primates include monkeys and apes along with humans, our very own family tree. This particular fossil was over a million years old and had features that suggested it was an early human ancestor, or otherwise very closely related to humans.\n\nThe fossil was named Australopithecus, which means \u201csouthern ape.\u201d Since 1924 we\u2019ve discovered more remains, enough that currently, seven species of Australopithecus are recognized. The oldest dates to a bit over 4 million years old and was discovered in eastern Africa.\n\nAustralopithecus was probably pretty short compared to most modern humans, although they were probably about the size of modern chimpanzees. A big male might have stood about 4 \xbd feet tall, or 1.5 meters. They were bipedal, meaning they would have stood and walked upright all the time. That\u2019s the biggest hint that they were closely related to humans. Other great apes can walk upright if they want, but only humans and our closest ancestors are fully bipedal.\n\nIn 2008 a palaeoanthropologist named Lee Rogers Berger took his nine-year-old son Matthew to Malapa Cave in South Africa. Dr. Berger was leading an excavation of the cave and Matthew wanted to see it. While he was there, Matthew noticed something that even his father had overlooked. It turned out to be a collarbone belonging to an Australopithecus boy who lived almost 2 million years ago. Later, Dr Berger\u2019s team uncovered more of the skeleton and determined that the remains belonged to a new species of Australopithecus, which they named Australopithecus sediba. More remains of this species were discovered later, including a beautifully preserved lower back. That discovery was important because it allowed scientists to determine that this species of Australopithecus had already evolved the inward curve in the lower back that humans still have, which helps us walk on two legs more easily. That was a surprise, since A. sediba also still shows features that indicate they could still climb trees like a great ape.\n\nIt\u2019s possible that Australopithecus, along with other species of early humans, climbed trees at night to stay safe from predators. In the morning, they climbed down to spend the day mostly on the ground. One study published only a few weeks ago as this episode goes live suggests that the flexible shoulders and elbows that humans share with our great ape cousins originally evolved to help apes climb down from trees safely. Monkeys don\u2019t share our flexible shoulder and elbow joints because they\u2019re much lighter weight than a human or ape, and don\u2019t need as much flexibility to keep from falling while climbing down. Apes and hominins like humans can raise our arms straight up over our heads, and we can straighten our arms out completely flat.