Wide-hipped fossil changes picture of Homo erectus:
Writing in the journal Science, Simpson and colleagues said the size and shape of the 1.2 million-year-old pelvis indicates that H. erectus females had hips wider than those of modern human females and their infants were born with heads about 30 percent larger than previously calculated.“What this means is the offspring were not as helpless as a modern human,” he said in a telephone interview.
“It is not coming out walking and talking. But it was probably capable of more advanced behavior at a younger age like grasping, like sitting up … than we would see in a modern human.”
Scientists did not know much about what [H. erectus's] body would have looked like until the discovery of “Turkana Boy,” an adolescent H. erectus whose bones were discovered in 1984.His slim-hipped build led researchers to believe that H. erectus gave birth to small-headed babies that would have required a great deal of care in early life, much like modern human infants.
But Simpson said Turkana boy’s pelvis was damaged and the restoration of a near-complete female pelvis from Gona, Ethiopia, changes this picture.