The fossil site of Malapa in the Cradle of Humankind, South Africa yielded two partial skeletons

FOXP2, a gene implicated in affecting speech and language, is held up as a textbook example of positive selection on a human-specific trait

Our species' ability to occupy diverse and "extreme" settings around the world stands in stark contrast to the ecological adaptations of other hominin taxa

The "virtual" revisiting of a fossil described as "the oldest evidence of human evolution in South Africa" shows surprising results

The discovery helps round out the picture of a creature that scientists now know shared the landscape with modern humans—and probably other hominin species—between 226,000 and 335,000 years ago