The skull in brief
SK 48 is a cranium from the cave of Swartkrans in the Cradle of Humankind, near Johannesburg. It is an adult Paranthropus robustus, missing only its lower jaw. The face is broad and flat with a heavy brow, and the cast shown here has pale material filling the gaps where bone was missing.
The find
SK 48 turned up in 1950 in a heap of rubble at Swartkrans, which was being mined for lime, and it was a quarryman named Fourie who found it. The skull was damaged when it was blasted out of the rock, but it is otherwise little distorted. Robert Broom described it, and since its sagittal crest is small he thought it belonged to a female. It is about 1.8 to 1.5 million years old.
Why it matters
For a long time SK 48 was the best skull of its species, and it provided the main picture of what the South African robust australopith looked like, until more complete fossils turned up at Drimolen decades later. It sits alongside the East African skulls OH 5 and KNM-ER 406 in showing how widely this heavy-jawed group spread. See Sterkfontein for the caves of the area.
Where it is
The Swartkrans fossils are held by the Ditsong National Museum of Natural History in Pretoria.
Sources
- Broom, R. and Robinson, J. T. (1952). Swartkrans ape-man, Paranthropus crassidens. Transvaal Museum Memoir 6.
- Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Human Origins Program. SK 48.