PALEOANTHROPOLOGIST FINDS 2 MILLION YEAR OLD HOMINID SKIN?

His jaw must have dropped when he examined the material before him. It was a rare find. So rare, in fact, that, if what he was looking at was really what he thought it could be, it would be the first and only evidence of soft body tissue from an early hominin ever discovered.......soft tissue from an early (possible) pre-human ancestor nearly 2 million years old. The find was part of the remains uncovered by paleoanthropologist Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand and his colleagues when they discovered fossils of Australopithecus sediba, a possible precursor to our earliest human ancestors (the Homo genus) in the Malapa cave system of South Africa.

"I was standing with Lee in his lab looking at what might be australopithecine skin" said Dr. John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist with the University of Wisconsin - Madison. "I'm not talking about an imprint of skin, like a skin cast. These appear to be thinly layered, possibly mineralized tissue"[1].

The possible mineralized skin tissue was found on top of the skull of the fossil remains of what was identified as a young boy, and on the jaw near the chin of a fossilized woman. Scientists suggest that such surviving evidence is possible because the remains of the individuals found at Malapa were rapidly deposited and entombed in a thick layer of sand and clay through natural causes in a cave or shaft at or soon after their deaths. The relatively rapid burial of their bodies in this single layer of clay and sand, combined with the comparatively protected environment of the cave or shaft system, significantly slowed their decomposition. The same conditions also made it possible for scientists to discover the individuals in articulated condition (body elements or parts arranged as they were "connected" in life as a single individual), a rare find, particularly for early hominins.

IF IT TURNS OUT TO BE HOMINID SKIN WITH EXTRACTABLE DNA, THEN I WANT THEM TO COMPARE THE DNA TO MICHELLE OBAMA'S! SHOULD BE A CLOSE MATCH!