BBCnews brings us news of a recent find from the venerable Sterkfontein cave complex in South Africa. Sterkfontein is one of the first, best sources of human fossile remains in the world. They even have their own website (warning: very slow).

The biggest problem with Sterkfontein, along with most other of these sorts of cave complexes, is the stratigraphy is a horrific jumble. Things fell into these caves all the time (our ancestors just being a small part of the heap), got stirred around in floods, storms, and cave-ins, and were eventually blasted out of the ground when the site was used as a limestone quarry. Until the latest radiocarbon dating techniques came along, it simply wasn't possible to figure out just how old things were in those caves.

While it's not reported in this story, it is widely believed the reason our ancestors actually ended up in the caves wasn't because they fell in, but rather because leopards tended to drag their kills into the trees which inevitably surround these caves (and perhaps are key to their formation), and, well, bits fall off. We weren't always at the top of the food chain.