By Ewen Callaway of Nature magazine

Fossilized teeth of early human ancestors bear signs that females left their families when they came of age, whereas males stayed close to home.

A chemical analysis of australopithecine fossils ranging between roughly 1.8 million and 2.2 million years old from two South African caves finds that teeth thought to belong to females are more likely to have incorporated minerals from a distant region during formation than those from males.

"What that's telling us is that the females grew up somewhere else and they died in the caves," says Julia Lee-Thorp, an archaeological scientist at the University of Oxford, UK, and a co-author on the study, published today in Nature . [More]














Source: Female Australopiths Left Home Once Mature, Males Didn't