Sacrum morphology supports taxonomic heterogeneity of "Australopithecus africanus" at Sterkfontein Member 4

Funding

We are grateful to Ronald J. Clarke for discussing the Southern African australopithecine morphology and taphonomy, and for providing comments on an earlier version of the paper. For the fossil material we thank Stephany Potze, Ditsong National Museum of Natural History; Bernhard Zipfel, Evolutionary Studies Institute, University of the Witwatersrand; Metasebia Endalamaw and Yared Assefa, National Museum of Ethiopia. For the modern human and great ape samples we are indebted to: Jocelyne Desideri, Laboratory of Prehistoric Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Geneva; Harald Wilfing, Katrin Schaeffer, and Katarina Matiasek, Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Vienna; Marcia Ponce de Leon, Anthropological Institute and Museum, University of Zurich; Darrin Lunde, Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History; Eduard Winter, Sabine Eggers, Karin Wilschke-Schrotta, Frank Zachos, Nicole Grunstra, Natural History Museum Vienna; Monica Zavattaro, Jacopo Moggi-Cecchi, Natural History Museum, University of Florence; Emmanuel Gilissen, Royal Museum for Central Africa; Barbara Oberholzer, Zoological Museum, University of Zurich; Louise Corron, Department of Anthropology, University of Nevada; Loic Costeur, Natural History Museum Basel; Digital Morphology Museum, KUPRI, Kyoto University; Museum of Primatology CARTA, University of California, San Diego. We thank Fred L. Bookstein for discussion of the statistics and for helping writing the codes for the Quadratic Discriminant Analysis and for the Procrustes fit on a landmark subset. Alexander Gruber and Matthias Diem helped coding utilities on Spyder, Python. This project was financially supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant Nos 31003A_156299/1 and 31003A_176319).